There is a Slack bot for everything. Oskar tracks how happy your coworkers are. Shoulda Coulda shows you how many times everyone says "should." Huskybot is "for people who need Siberian huskies, now."
Since Slack launched two years ago, it’s been the darling app, the hot new thing for intraoffice chat and organization. It perfectly combined the long-cherished interoperability of IRC and Hipchat with the trendy polish of Trello. Microsoft uses Slack. The New York Times uses Slack. Slack uses Slack.
Of course, Slack is beloved in no small part because it’s an insidery media thing. There are those who use Slack, and there are the great unwashed who don’t. It has a conspiratorial air to it: Oh, take that to the group Slack or Did you see what she posted in team Slack? Such bonding is part of what’s made Slack one of the fastest growing hubs for online community. (And another corner of the Internet where coworkers can hit on you.)
For those not using Slack, Slack is a messaging platform that is far more robust than just chatting. It's focused on productivity and efficiency—and fun.
Slack has become much, much more than a communication tool, in large part because of its bots. Oh sure, Slack had to win people over by making them work better. And it succeeded. "Basically I said, 'Team, we’re going to switch to this new thing called Slack for a few days and see how it works," says Ben Brown at XOXCO, who embraced the platform while it was still in beta. "We never went back, and, as the story goes, our internal email use dropped to nearly zero … As I like to say, [Slack] went from the second screen to the first screen to the full screen."
There are many reasons why his team embraced Slack. Syncing. Easy search. Emoji. And, of course, the bots. "Suddenly Slack is becoming 'mainstream' in the context of technology workers, and Slack is the kind of environment where delivering services via a conversational UI finally makes sense, as opposed to email or a wiki," says Slack founder Stewart Butterfield. "This has created the conditions were there is finally a market for services delivered via conversational UIs—and it turns out that there a lot of services that could only really be designed with a conversational UI in the milieu of a messaging app for teams: PMbot and Scrumbot and Growbot and schedulers and team-level virtual assistants and a bunch of other stuff."
A bot, at its most basic, is a piece of software that performs an automated task, be it finding an awesome GIF, ordering toilet paper, or downloading a file. The social Web has a tenuous relationship with bots. AOL bots were hacks, developed to get around the platform’s protocol. (Your beloved SmarterChild was never meant to exist.) Twitter, the land of the bots, has a love-hate relationship with them. They aren’t necessarily being hunted down, but bots like those built to win contests are considered a misuse of the API. Facebook has a zero tolerance policy.
While bots have long lived in the quieter corners of the Internet, apps like Slack (and WhatsApp, Kik, and WeChat) are pushing them into the mainstream.“Here, bots can be first class citizens instead of these underhanded things in the background,” says Brown, who’s been building bots since the ages of IRC.
"Bots are great at making sense out of lots of different types of information (schedules, meeting notes, documents, notifications from other business applications), and making all of that data more useful by allowing people to interact with it like they would in a conversation with a person," says a Slack head of platform April Underwood. Slack's bottom line: Make work better, easier, more productive. "Bots are one way to delivery on that promise." When asked about platforms that are either anti-bot or sort of hush-hush about their existence, Slack says it's "always been pro bot!"
Slack bots range from the obvious—bots for recognizing good work, posting photos, translating text—to the utterly inane, like playing poker. Another tells you who's talking too much, seemingly to shut them up. There's one to notify you each time your startup is mentioned somewhere online, streamlining that whole wasting time on the Internet thing. They absolutely can save you time.
"The entire audience is shifting from people who just build bots to people who want to have things automated so they can use bots to do something instead of downloading an app to their phone, finding the folder with that app, learning how it works, relearning its UI every time it changes," says Brown. "Now you just text or tell the bot and it does it for you. It’s like talking to a friend or talking to a coworker instead of talking to a machine."
However, reimagining machines as coworkers may not be a great idea, says Dr. Emilio Ferrara, co-author of the paper "The Rise of Social Bots."
"To the extent to which a bot works as mediator or personal assistant, I think they can bring positive effects in some work contexts," he says. "However, in extreme cases in which all human interaction on future workplaces may be mediated through bots, the real risk will be alienation."
Talking to coworkers, seeking their help, or simply chatting with them over mundane tasks provides opportunities for insight and inspiration. Office-oriented bots can boost productivity, but at the cost of workplace interaction, Ferrara says. Bots can’t do things like offer constructive feedback or suggest new ideas. If we start preferring bots to humans, we could miss opportunities for collaboration and exploration.
This actually could become a problem, because many people use Slack for personal interactions. Few people go home and open Trello or Hipchat, but Slack is just plain fun. You can chat with friends, order beers or ice cream for each other, or simply interact with a bot. This, and the fact we're all spending far too much time staring at screens these days, makes it easy to see people talking to bots more than each other.
There is one crucial feature protecting us from this. Slack, unlike Twitter, labels its bots. There's no wondering if you're talking to a real person. Ferrara says this is vital part in keeping the bot-human divide. This will be more important as the number of bots rises. Already there are companies like Large that will make them for you. Need to order lunch? Ask @large. Fridge low on beer? Ping @large. Its latest endeavor: A Slack bot that orders ice cream.
Developers building apps say Slack provides some support for their endeavors, but it could be more helpful. And adding a bot to specific room requires admin approval, so there's a little friction involved in getting them going. And there's little in the way of curation or promotion, so something like an app store for bots is an idea developers would totally get behind.
Brown admits there are challenges to making Slackbots, and some significant design constraints. But this may be what makes them so charming. “Everything is built in text," he says. "And it has to act sort of like a person—you talk to it, it talks back. This creates a totally different experience compared to a traditional app or webpage." This interactivity and almost casual nature are what makes the experience so interesting, and may be why it's so resonated. "I talk to it, then you talk to it, then it talks back. I don’t know of any other software that is like that,” Brown says. “Sure, there are collaboration tools like Google docs, but when you use that, you see your own personal view. With bots, it’s like we’re playing a board game together where the bot sets the rules and everyone using it is a player.”
But Slack has, very quickly, grown much bigger than Slack—it’s far more than just an organizational tool for the office. People Slacks instead of forums or social networks. They use them instead of email lists. They use them for, well, lots of things. The New York Times uses Slack to determine what it posts online, for example. It won't be long before bots are doing many things a person otherwise would do—moderate chat rooms or comments, teach online education courses, connect people to the Internet of Things. Rather than connecting to something like a smart thermostat with an app, it's easy to see a day when you simply text a bot.
Of course, all of this raises a vital question. Sure, bots can make us more efficient and productive, and it can make the workplace more fun. Slack says if bots "can simplify your day-to-day activity by even 1-2 percent, that represents huge gains in time you get back in your life." But what are we going to do with that time saved scheduling meetings, placing a lunch order or making sure we locked the door? Work more?
It's a legitimate question, one worth pondering. But anything that can reduce tedium, make work a little more enjoyable, and foster a positive environment while making people even a little more productive almost certainly will become more popular than you can imagine. So for now, embrace Slack's weird, wonderful bots and turn your Slack channel into a Pokémon dreamscape.
