Slack Search Assistant

Searching with Unleash from Slack

The Unleash app for Slack allows you to quickly find and share information with a channel or ask questions and get answers without leaving Slack. To comprehensively answer your questions, the app utilizes all your knowledge connected to Unleash, including wikis, collections, and other connected apps.

To install the Unleash app for Slack, the owner of the Unleash workspace should follow the steps below. If the owner of the Unleash workspace is not an Admin on Slack, he might need to request the Slack administrator in the company to approve the installation.

To install the Unleash App for Slack:

• Open Unleash.

• Click onAdmin Center.

• Click on Experiences.

• On the Unleash for Slack option, click Install (only available for workspace admins).

• Select the workspace to add the app to.

• Click Allow.

Available Commands

Using the Unleash App in Slack

The Unleash app for Slack allows you to quickly find answers to your questions or search for resources without leaving Slack.

Asking questions:

• From any chat or channel, type /ask followed by your question.

• Hit Enter.

When you use /ask in a channel where the bot is invited:

• The “Looking for an answer” message is  visible only to you (the user who asked the question).

• If expert validation is enabled for the channel:

  • The answer will be sent to an expert and once approved by an expert will be displayed as “visible to you”.

    This means that no one else in the channel will see the question you asked or the answer you received.

• The answer is extracted based on the sources set for the channel.

Experts will receive the answer for approval via a direct message from the Unleash bot for Slack.

When you use /ask in a channel where the bot is not invited:

• The answer is extracted from sources available to you rather than channel-specific settings.

• The answer does not go through expert validation.

• The “Looking for an answer” message is visible only to you.

• The answer will only be visible to you.

• There is no option to share the answer with the channel.

• This behavior also applies to DMs.

If the user is online in Slack, the answer will be sent in the same conversation. If they're offline, it will be delivered via a direct message from the bot.

When a user runs /ask in a private conversation with the Unleash bot:

• The bot behaves like a regular conversation, responding directly to the user.

Searching for resources:

• From any chat or channel, type /u [search query].

  • If you know the app the resource is in you can conduct a more refined search by typing /u [app name] [search query].

• Hit Enter.

• To see more results, click Next Results.

• Click on a resource to open it.

• Click Share to share the resource with the chat/channel.

Answering Colleagues' Questions

You can easily assist a colleague by letting the Unleash App handle their question, eliminating the need for a personal response.

To answer a colleague’s question in Slack:

• When a colleague poses a question, click on the three-dot menu of the question.

• Click Answer.

  • If you do not see this option, try clicking on More message shortcuts.

• Unleash will extract knowledge from your connected resources in Unleash to provide answers. If an answer is found, it will include the source of the information, with clickable links for further details and any other related links.

• If the provided knowledge is accurate, click Publish.

  • The answer will be shared with members of the channel/chat.

• If the answer is irrelevant, click Discard.

DM’ing the Unleash App

Using the Unleash app in direct messages ensures you get quick, accurate responses and easy access to additional information. Think of it as your personal answering machine. If an answer is found, it will include the source of the information, with clickable links for further details and any other related links.

• From Slack, under Apps, click on Unleash.

• On the top menu, click on Messages.

• Type your question and hit Enter.

• Give a thumbs up or down on the relevance of the answer.

  • We encourage feedback on the app's generated answers to enhance our algorithm. When negative feedback is received, we enable the user to provide a reason for the feedback and, if possible, add the URL for a correct answer, allowing us to understand better what went wrong.

Sharing Go Links

Easily share Go Links with your colleagues or access important links directly from Slack.

• From any chat or channel, type /go [link name].

• Hit Enter.

• The Go Link will be shared with the chat/channel you are in and is clickable, redirecting you to the URL assigned to the Go Link.

Permissions

Unleash Slack app requires the following scopes to function correctly:

"chat:write",
"channels:history",
"channels:read",
"commands",
"files:read",
"groups:history",
"groups:read",
"im:history",
"users:read",
"users:read.email",
"reactions:write",
"reactions:read"

In addition, the following events are being subscribed by the Slackbot

"app_home_opened",
"member_joined_channel",
"member_left_channel",
"channel_rename",
"group_rename",
"channel_left",
"group_left",
"channel_deleted",
"group_deleted",
"message.channels",
"message.groups",
"reaction_added",
"message.im"

Good to know:

Unleash Slack app, by default, does not index or scan any messages from Slack. Only after it is  invited to a specific channel and activated will it start to index messages from that Channel.  Unleash Slack app never indexes any message in a DM chat.

The owner of the Unleash workspace can explicitly whitelist the Slack channels into which the bot can be invited and prevent the bot from being used in unapproved channels. If a user invites the Unleash bot into a channel that is not in the allowed list, the bot will be deactivated and perform no action of message indexing or participating in the chat until the admin whitelists the channel.

Generally speaking, Unleash for Slack is another interface through which users can utilize the Unleash search engine. All security rules set by the admin within Unleash are fully enforced also within the Slack environment.