Ta-dah! It’s finally here! Our very first scheduling bot on Slack!
Our entire team is thrilled to launch the open beta of our Slack bot, and wanted to share how we decided to build the bot and what you can expect from our new product.
Why Slackbot?
Kono Team is mainly consisted of engineers having expertise in machine learning, data analysis, and web & mobile product development. Main engineering team is working in Seoul, and some of our team members are working in San Francisco, Singapore as well. Because of our remote & flexible work hour culture, we’ve been communicating with each others via emails and Slack.
Especially we are chatting a lot in Slack. The below snapshot shows how many messages exchanged by our team members. The snapshot is a summary of the weekly stats of our team’s Slack workspace at the end of Feb 2018.
Thus, while running our email bot service, our team took a closer look at how we schedule our own meetings and were able to elucidate three key points to address to better our product.
- Our team meetings are mostly ad-hoc meetings, set up quite spontaneously.
- We spend way more time on Slack than we do in email apps.
- Even though we are frequently using our own email bot, whenever setting up internal meetings, toggling between email, calendar apps and Slack is quite annoying and time consuming.
To address these problems, we decided to build a Slack bot that will handle scheduling from within the app. A bot that lives on the same platform we use to communicate and requires fewer steps than an email bot does.
Met Slack HQ Team
To fully incorporate Kono to Slack system, we met with Slack HQ team last November to present this idea, ask for feedback, and share our concerns and questions. Developer evangelists and product managers of Slack HQ team visited our R&D center, and had a great discussion with our product team.
There were two key recommendations we got from this extraordinary opportunity that guided our approach, thinking, and design.
Always dialogue interface is better than app-like one? No!
Slackbot interface is moving into an app-like form rather than just a chat. Build a bot that has an app-like quality, putting users on a predictable path where they engage with UI elements and can see how the bot carries out a scheduling task. Give users ability to set up a meeting.
In order to implement the app-like UI elements, our engineer team studied Slack interactive APIs a lot here. (https://api.slack.com/interactive-messages).
Designing interaction with bot
Enrich interaction with rich controls. Use ephemeral messages to ask users who they’d like to invite, what time frame they’d like to host the meeting, or if they’d like to opt in to this meeting. We found this play a big role in building trust over the bot.
Rather than adding more commands and complex options, we’ve been focusing on developing the sleek & fluent flows of interaction with out bot for basic scheduling features. Kono Slack bot is designed for setting up internal meetings, searching events on calendars, and changing them right from Slack.
What To Expect?
Since its private beta program started earlier this month, our team has discovered three cases in which our Slack bot, Kono, can be useful in a team setting.
The first is as a work calendar within Slack — Kono will create a list of meetings everyone in your team has scheduled and send it to each person as an ephemeral message when requested.That way, you and your team can see what they have for the day/week at any moment of the conversation in a channel.
Kono is also useful as a repository for your team’s availability — The bot double checks every party’s availability in order to schedule meetings without conflicts. This means that every meeting is at a time that would work for everyone without further consultation. Keeping the messaging back and forth minimal is essential when setting up meetings on the fly. You’ll see how easier it is to set up group meeting with Kono than polling.
Call Kono in your own way —Don’t forget our bot is powered by Kono.ai which is the artificial intelligence to schedule meetings & appointments. The bot understands your own language for scheduling, and as you are using Kono more and more, the bot can learn more about your expressions and scheduling patterns.
The best commands to try with your new Kono Slack bot are as following.
Set up a meeting at a specific time
“@kono schedule a meeting with @emi at 3pm tomorrow.”
“/kono set up a meeting with @emi at 10am next Friday.”
Set up a meeting over a certain time frame
“@kono set up a meeting next week with @kay.”
“/kono schedule a meeting.”
Show a list of meetings scheduled
“@kono what do I have next mon”
“/kono show me my meetings with @nic.”
Reschedule or cancel a meeting
“@kono, cancel my meeting with @jin tmrw”
“/kono, reschedule the meeting with @jin today”
What are you waiting for?
To experience this bot in action on your Slack Team, head over to Kono Slack Bot’s Webpage here(https://kono.ai/slack/) and add it to your team’s workspace.
