Slack

Slack brings your workspace’s conversations into the brain: one document per thread, a message together with its replies. It is available where your deployment has turned it on.

Company-wide connection (admin only)

Under Settings, on the Connections tab, choose Connect on Slack. Slack asks you to add the app to your workspace. Back in the app, the card shows the workspace’s name and your email address.

Then choose Manage and tick the channels to share. Slack shares areas, not folders: each channel is one area, with nothing to browse inside.

• Every public channel is listed. The brain can read one only after the Slack app is in it, so invite the app to the channel in Slack (type /invite and the app’s name in the channel). Until then, the card says the channel needs the app.
• A private channel shows up only after the Slack app has been invited to it.
• Direct messages are never offered for the whole company.

What the brain reads

• Each thread becomes one document, with every message under its author’s name and time. Mentions of people and channels show as names, and attached files are listed by name. The files themselves are not read.
• The first read goes back a number of days your deployment sets (90 by default). After that, new messages arrive on every sync.
• A new reply brings its thread up to date when the thread started within the last two weeks, or when the reply was also sent to the channel.
• Deleting a message that started a thread removes its document when the message was posted within the last two weeks.

Personal connections

On the same tab, Slack has a switch, Employees can connect their own. It is off by default. When an admin turns it on, everyone sees a Just for you line on Slack in Connected apps:

• You sign in to Slack with your own account and tick what to share: channels you belong to, your direct messages and your group direct messages. Direct messages are named by the people in them, such as “DM with Ana Ruiz”.
• Only you can ask about what you share. Its documents show as Private and never reach the knowledge graph or the shared memory.
• The admin sees who connected, by name, and can disconnect a person. The admin cannot see what they shared.

Asking about Slack

During a chat, the brain can read the latest messages of a shared channel or conversation, for things said too recently to be in the knowledge base. If you have your own Slack connection, it can also search messages, and it keeps only the results from the conversations you shared. Both only read. The brain never posts, reacts, edits, deletes or joins a channel in Slack. To ask your agents from inside Slack instead, see Asking from Slack, which uses its own bot and settings.

Stop sharing

Unticking a channel or disconnecting removes its threads from the brain, after asking first. See Sharing folders and areas.

For the deploying team

Create the Slack app inside the client’s own workspace at api.slack.com/apps, so Slack treats it as the workspace’s own app and does not apply the stricter limits it sets for apps distributed to other workspaces. Under OAuth & Permissions, add the redirect URL <APP_PUBLIC_URL>/connections/slack/callback (Slack accepts https addresses only), the bot scopes channels:read, channels:history, groups:read, groups:history, users:read, users:read.email and team:read, and, for personal connections, the user scopes channels:read, channels:history, groups:read, groups:history, im:read, im:history, mpim:read, mpim:history, search:read, users:read, users:read.email and team:read. Leave token rotation off: the connector handles rotating tokens too, but Slack cannot switch rotation off again once it is on. Put the app’s client id and secret in SLACK_CLIENT_ID and SLACK_CLIENT_SECRET, and set CONNECTOR_SLACK_ENABLED=true. See Environment variables.