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We use a chatbot to make certain obscure tasks more accessible to every member of our Slack team. Our chatbot's name is halpy. You can also read more about our chatbot philosophy.

Talking to halpy

You can talk to halpy in a few ways:

1. Publicly in channel: halpy <command>
   • This is best for when others might benefit from seeing the command, via teaching either the what or the how: The what being "the information halpy will reply with", and the how being "how we got halpy to do it". If you think either of those might be useful, please do feel free to address halpy publicly! Yay teaching!
2. Direct message. This can be helpful if you need info, but don't think it would contribute to group discussion. This can be done in two ways:
   1. within direct message pane: <command>
      • when you're already talking to halpy, no need to address zir -- just use the commands directly!
   2. from a public channel: `/msg halpy
      • This saves you having to leave the channel.

Features

Help

Halpy has a lightweight built-in "help" feature, that lists a one-liner for each command he can do.

Run it with halpy help.

You can filter results with halpy help <some filter>

Factoids

Example:

Factoids are little pieces of information that halpy keeps in zir brain. These bits of information can be anything: links, acronyms, jargon, or whatever. Each factoid gets saved with a key that can be used to retrieve it.

RSS Feeds

• per-channel
• anyone can add or remove
• works great for Google Alerts (which can be created as RSS feeds)
• mention :spam: emoji as an idea for a convention to tersely express thought that an auto-posted message is too noisy