Answer channel questions from what was already said
Answers a question posted in Slack using only the messages that channel already contains, in a thread.
What it does
The integration steps this workflow runs, in the order it first runs them.
- 1SlackNew message trigger
- 2SlackGet channel history
- 3OpenAIQuery model
- 4SlackFind messages
- 5SlackSend message
How it works
Everything the template sets up, and what to fill in before the first run.
Most questions in a busy channel have already been answered further up - the problem is that nobody scrolls back. This workflow watches one channel and wakes up when someone posts a message containing your ask word (something like '@ask'). It reads the channel's recent messages, works out a short search phrase for the question and searches deeper into the same channel's history for older messages that match, then drafts an answer from those messages alone and posts it in a thread under the question.
It is deliberately unable to answer from anything else. When the channel has said nothing on the subject it says so instead of improvising, and when the draft turns out to quote a figure that appears in none of the messages it withholds the draft and posts the messages themselves, so the person asking always gets the channel's own words and never gets an invented number.
Answers go in a thread rather than the channel, so the bot's own replies are never mistaken for new questions, and anything it echoes back has its @-mentions defused first - no one gets pinged by a quoted message. Other people's questions to the bot are skipped when it gathers evidence, since a question is not an answer.
It reads the messages posted in the channel itself. Replies written inside a thread are not part of what Slack hands back, so an answer that only ever lived in a thread is not something this can find.
To set it up, choose the channel on the trigger step, put the word people will address the bot with in 'askWord', and describe your team in 'teamContext'.
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