How to Build a Custom Slackbot Skill in Minutes (Full Transcript)

[00:00:00] Speaker 1: Do you want to see how easy it is to give SlackBot a skill? Watch this. Hello and welcome back to Slack School. My name is Mike Reynolds. I'm your host. I'm part of the Slack team here at Salesforce. And today we're going to talk about SlackBot's skills. Skills are reusable sets of instructions that you can give to SlackBot and have SlackBot process all sorts of different things. There's a few that come out of the box that are very handy, but today we're going to create our own skill. Of course, you could try this on your own in the Slack community workspace at slackcommunity.com. Then you'd be able to follow along with me. But I tell you, the one we're creating today is going to be pretty amazing. Let's get after it. The first thing I'm going to do is actually shrink my sidebar because I don't need that to be there. So if you didn't know about that, you can collapse that whole left side pane by doing Command-Shift-D or bring it back with Command-Shift-D. I like that. It's a little cleaner look when you're really trying to get some work done. It helps me stay focused. So what we're going to do is give SlackBot a set of instructions to make SlackBot be my chief of staff. Everybody needs a chief of staff, and that's just what we're going to get with SlackBot. So I'm going to give SlackBot a set of instructions to check a bunch of different things, and then SlackBot's going to help me build a skill, ask me any follow-up questions that I need, and then we'll test it out and see how it goes. So I've said to SlackBot, hey, let's check Salesforce, my calendar, my inbox, review everything in Slack, just check everything. Let's get all of that summarized and then give it back to me and make sure that I'm not forgetting things and to help me sort of understand exactly what's getting ready to happen that day. So let's see what SlackBot says. I love the idea. Chief of staff skill is going to be super useful. So it's recapping to me exactly what I requested. So it's making sure that it understands what I wanted. This is a good opportunity for me to say, well, you missed that part or yeah, that part was good. This seems pretty straightforward. A few more things worth considering. Upcoming deadlines, that's good. Priority Slack channels, that's also really good. Action items, yes. Let's just say, yeah, that all looks good. We'll just say toss all of that down. Oh, I didn't answer this last question. So SlackBot asked me, what does the final output look like? And I didn't specify. So SlackBot's going to have to fill that in on their own. SlackBot's gone ahead and built the skill. Before we actually take a look at it, let's go ahead and run it. So I would expect SlackBot, now that I've said try it out, to check all of the sources that we've talked about and then summarize this and then feed the information back to me. One thing that will be interesting is to see how it's structured it since I didn't specify that. Another thing you'll notice is it's giving me this indicator that it's specifically using a skill. So anytime a skill is going to be used, you're going to see that as well as the specifics within the skill. So it's showing here that it's reviewing different things. I can always kind of click into that and see all of the different things that it did, read my email, read my calendar, scoring my recent activity, checking our Salesforce environment. It's doing all sorts of different things. And now it's going to start to provide me with a summary. So let's look and see what SlackBot said. Good morning. Here's what we've got. So I do have travel tomorrow. It's got my flight information. That's pretty great. I've got some demo build. I've got some footage out there. My one-on-one's going to get moved around. It's getting that from my inbox. Nothing else pressing. Nothing on my calendar today, which is reasonable. It's a weekend. But tomorrow, I've got my flight. I've got check-in information. I've got a conference the following day. A lot of stuff on my calendar. Even more stuff on my calendar for Tuesday. Tuesday's very full. But I land nice and early, and I have a gap until my first meeting. That's nice. From Slack, looks like I've got a lot of different things to do. I like how it's going to cite some of my coworkers, like, hey, this person specifically asking me for stuff, which is great. And it looks like my travel approvals are all set for my next two weeks. That's pretty fantastic. The nice thing about skills is that skills are shareable. So if I were making a skill for something like, let's say, creating an account summary or creating an executive brief or a root cause analysis for why a bug went, any of these things I could do every single time, and I can build it and then share it with my colleagues. So for example, let's say I am a marketer, and I need to create a piece of, you know, some type of creative asset that's going to go out the door. And before I share it with everybody, I would like to just have it reviewed from some specific personas. I can have Slackbot adopt those five personas that I want to use and review the same piece of creative and then summarize all of that and then feed it back to me so that I can polish it just one more time before I share it with all of my colleagues. And then I can share that Slackbot skill with everybody else so everybody gets to benefit from it. The nice thing, if we go back and look at the actual skill itself, the skill lives as a canvas that I can share and update. It'll show me when it was last updated, which is going to be today, the date it was created. And I can hide this bit at the top and see exactly what Slackbot is doing. Now note, this is all editable. So if I wanted to rearrange these steps or if I wanted to add new steps, I can add them. And as soon as I update this canvas, the skill is going to be updated for everyone using the skill. And that's pretty handy if you've got a process change and you want to make sure that everybody is adopting that process change immediately. A good example of that would be, here's how we do an account analysis. I want everyone to be following the same format. Then six months down the road, we realize, hey, we want to include a new step. Maybe we've got a new tool that we bring in and we want to be able to leverage that. We've connected it to Slack and Slackbot. So then we just go into the skill canvas and then we change what that says. Everybody inherits that new skill immediately. No additional training or effort required. So there you have it. Creating a skill with Slackbot is easy and it can have a huge impact on your day. Anything that you do over and over again, even if it's only occasionally, is a great opportunity to create a skill. One of the first skills that I created was a skill that allows Slackbot to draft a blog based on my Slack School videos. Now this is something that I wasn't even able to do. I didn't have time to create a blog for every one of the videos that I made. But because Slackbot is drafting that based on the notes that I have in Slack and the video itself, about 95% of the work is done. I can have one pass over it, maybe 20 to 30 minutes, and I have something that I didn't even used to be able to do because I didn't have enough time. And so Slackbot has actually given me the opportunity to deliver even more ways to consume the content that I'm able to create. And that's pretty amazing. Don't forget to like and subscribe and join us in the Slack Community Workspace at slackcommunity.com. You can join the Slack School channel, see all of the other episodes that we've done, ask questions, or just say hi. We'll see you next time. Oh, and hey, you did a great job. Bye. Nebula. Stop being a bother. You're going to knock the camera stand over.