We are starting to build a couple of conversational UI programs at work using Slack. Slack is a great program and I wrote an earlier post about some challenges I had writing a basic integration.

So now we're tackling something a bit more sophisticated and building some bots. The first will be to handle a couple of basic data entry tasks that we have that we think will be better or easier if people can do them directly from Slack.

Of course we'll need to get user feedback on whether they actually make life easier, but I think by investing a little time in the bot it will improve things. We plan to do this in two ways:

1. Our bot will parse some answers and use extracted information to pre-fill some other data.
2. Allow multiple entry/splits on some items by indicating that you want to do so. Where this would require a grid in the web, and might be unnatural given the flow of existing pages, we think it will work quite naturally in the bot.

More updates as we make some progress.

Link to part 2.