Go beyond @slackbot with OneBar

Do people in your Slack ask a lot of repetitive questions you’re tired of answering? You need an Auto-Responder!

Slack has a built-in @slackbot which you can configure to automatically reply to simple messages like “What’s our wifi password?” or “How to order food?”. It’s very easy to use, but the functionality is extremely basic. You have to explicitly define all possible variants of the question (e.g., “What is X?”, “What’s X”, “What does X do?”), you can’t configure the behavior per-channel, it’s hard to create larger responses with rich formatting, it’s even harder to create a reasonably extensive F.A.Q. via such a basic UI. With OneBar you can break free of the @slackbot limitations, and set up advanced Auto-Responders for all your channels. Below you’ll find everything that you’ll need to know to configure OneBar for your workspace.

Photo by Andy Kelly on Unsplash

Let’s say, you manage a #people channel in your company — a place, where employees ask all kinds of HR-related questions. A lot of them are simple things like “What’s our wifi password,” “How to order lunch” or “How many paid off-days do I have per year.” Some are more complicated than the others, but regardless, you’d like to have a Bot that could resolve most of them automatically. To use OneBar for this purpose, you’ll first need to create a F.A.Q. — a group of OneBar Problems that share the same tag.

Creating a new Problem in OneBar

Add as many Problems as you want to create a complete F.A.Q.

HR tag page with a complete F.A.Q.

The F.A.Q. is ready and you can try searching through it using the search bar in the web app; however, it’s not yet connected to our #people channel. To do that, first, you’ll need to invite the @onebar bot to the channel. Just type /invite @onebar in the message bar, the bot should join the channel and post a greeting message. You can start asking it questions right away by mentioning @onebar on your messages, but to enable auto-reply, you have to go back to the OneBar web app, and open the channel settings under the Slack section.

OneBar bot settings for the #people channel

There are 5 levels of the bot verbosity that you can choose from:

• Silent — the bot never automatically responds to anything
• High Certainty — the bot will only reply automatically if it has a very good match for the question (e.g., an exact match in the question title)
• Medium Certainty — the bot will respond if it has a rather OK match, even though it may be wrong
• Medium + All Questions — same as Medium, but if there was no good match found and the message looks like a question, the bot will suggest to post it on OneBar
• Always Reply — the bot will reply to every message on the channel. This option is useful when you want to create a shared “OneBar” channel. People would come to such a channel only to talk to the OneBar bot without explicitly mentioning it in every message.

Additionally, you can limit the scope of the answers that the bot can choose from when providing an automated reply and in our example, we’d like to limit it to the “HR” tag. Finally, you can manage the list of tags the channel is subscribed to. If the channel is subscribed to a tag, and someone posts a new question on OneBar tagged with this tag, the channel will automatically receive a notification.

After you’ve configured the auto-reply behavior, you can start asking questions on your channel, and the bot should start responding automatically

OneBar bot provides automatic replies in the channel

Finally, people often tend to describe the same issue in a very different words. To help OneBar bot recognize different variations of the same thing, you can add Synonyms to your OneBar Problems. Here’s how it’s done in the web app:

Adding a Synonym to a Problem

There are many benefits of using OneBar, compared to the built-in @slackbot

• There’s no limit on the number of questions in the F.A.Q.
• You can have as many F.A.Qs as you want for all your different channels
• Bot behavior can be configured per-channel
• OneBar doesn’t just look for an exact match when searching for an answer, but rather tries to match each question to each record in the F.A.Q. semantically
• OneBar answers don’t always have to be short; you can use the WYSIWYG editor to create larger pieces of documentation
• People can comment on the bot answers and provide feedback
• You can build a full-fledged Knowledge Base using OneBar

Sign up for OneBar at onebar.io

Let us know in the comments section how was your experience, and what other things you would like OneBar bot to be able to do for you.

Thank you!