Slack

This agent enables communication between Katara and a Slack workspace, allowing Katara to read and write messages in its channels. Currently, Slack agents are used in the Community Support workflow to enable responding to questions in Slack channels.

Registering a Slack agent in your channel

When creating a Slack agent or adding an existing Slack agent to a channel, you will need to follow these steps:

1. Install the Katara Slack app in your workspace. If you already installed the app in your workspace, you can skip this step. You will be given a link for this.

2. If the channel you want to add the bot to is private, you will first have to add the bot to the channel using the /invite command.

3. Register the agent using the /register command. You will be given a one-time password for registration. NOTE: The agent will be enabled by default in the channel you register in. You will be able to change this in the agent's configuration.

4. Verify that the agent has been registered. You should see a confirmation message from the app and see that the group was registered successfully by verifying the registration on the same screen the other steps were given.

Agent configuration

Tags

Tags are applied to all future data collected by this agent, which can be used later for filtering. Tags set here will be inherited by all of the agent's channels.

Channel configuration

Registered Slack channels have configuration options that allow you to fine-tune how Katara behaves.

Changes to your channel's configuration can take up to a minute to apply.

Enabled

Whether to collect data from a channel—if a channel is disabled, we won't collect any data.

Reply policy

A channel's reply policy is how your agent will respond to messages sent in the channel. There are four policies:

• Always reply - Reply to every question asked. If an answer doesn't meet your Q&A agent's confidence threshold, the user will be informed that a high-confidence answer could not be found.

• Reply only when threshold is met - Reply to questions only when the answer meets your Q&A agent's confidence threshold.

• Reply to /ask command only - Reply to questions only when the user uses the /ask command.

• Replies off - Don't reply to any questions, but still collect them into your collection.

Q&A Agent

If sending replies, this option allows you to choose which Q&A Agent will generate the replies. This agent can then be configured to configure responses in your channel.

Tags

Tags are applied to all future data collected by this channel, which can be used later for filtering. Tags set in the agent's configuration are inherited here.

Commands

Commands can be typed into your Slack channel once you've installed the Katara bot.

/register <one_time_password>

Register an agent in your channel using a generated password. NOTE: The agent will be enabled by default in the channel you register in. You will be able to change this in the channel's configuration.

/ask <question>

Ask the agent a question, even if it's disabled in the channel. This will not produce an answer if you do not have a Q&A agent attached to the Slack channel.