Slack robots are handy robot assistants who get together in Slack, wait for commands, and then find or create what they need. You can build a Slack bot right now, in just a few minutes, without any code.
How difficult will it be? It depends on what you want on your bot to do.
Answer bots respond when someone uses a specific phrase and are the easiest bots to make. These are perfect for automatically answering questions that tend to appear frequently in Slack.
Notification bots see what's going on in other apps and send any updates to Slack, and they're pretty easy to do. These bots keep your team updated with information from other applications so you don't have to jump from one side to the other.
Slash command bots are activated by a command that starts with a forward slash and is one of the most difficult types of bots to do. An example is / gypsy, which is a command that activates a bot to find animated GIFs. You can make similar bots that get information from other applications.
In this article, we will describe how to make all three types of bots using Zapier, a tool that connects applications without any code.
Answer bots can save your team time by answering questions that come up again and again. They constantly watch all Slack channels and respond when specific phrases are mentioned.
There are two ways to do this type of bot. The first is to set up a Slack bot response. The second, which requires a little more configuration, but is much more customizable, is to build a custom bot using Zapier.
The answers to Slack bot, the easiest way to build a bot, are directly in the Slack settings. Add a phrase to keep the Slack bot on the lookout, and then tell it how to respond.
Now, it is time to use the data. Here are some quick ideas of what your command could do:
• Use the formatter to divide your text into sections, format text, calculate numbers, and more.
• Use searches and searches to find information in your favorite applications, perhaps to find a spreadsheet entry, a contact in a CRM, a client of your payment application, and more. There are also searches in apps like GIPHY that can find information online based on your query.
• Use Zapier's standard actions to save information in your applications, for example, to add a new contact, create a document, record time spent on a task, and more.
Go back to the tab where Zapier opened and click OK. I made this button for your webhook step. Zapier will find the data for his forward slash command and be ready to put it to work.
Let's try using a search to find a contact from the Google Contacts account. Add an action to the Zap, select Google Contacts, then use the Search contact action. Have it search by name, then select the text of your bar acts as the search query.