The New York Times has created its own Slackbot called Blossom that recommends which stories are worth posting to Facebook when asked, following a previous experimental Electionbot that posted election results in a relevant Slack channel for journalists.

Slackbot and similar chatbots’ future potential, though, lies in the ability for developers to programme it to perform more useful tasks. Slackbot is first encountered when it helps you fill out your profile on Slack, with basic uses including the ability to store any messages you send it (the “notepad” in the description above) and to be programmed with a range of automatic responses to lightly troll colleagues. One pivot and $340m of funding later, Slack is the talk of the technology industry, with more than 1.25 million daily active users of its apps and website using them to message their colleagues, as well as its resident chatbot. Tiny Speck’s first game, Glitch, wasn’t a hit, but the internet messaging software used by its developers had potential. Slack started as an internal tool for Tiny Speck, the games company launched by Stewart Butterfield, who’d previously co-founded photo-sharing service Flickr before selling it to Yahoo.

What does slackbot do