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Comment by siquick | Hacker News Reader

Slack, and messaging apps in general are the absolute last place I want AI functionality. I don’t want to think I’m chatting with someone when I’m actually with their AI PA.

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Making a fake Chatbot that can masquerade as a person is unlikely to be a feature of slack. In the article, it focuses on summarizing, which I personally feel would be immensely valuable. It would be great too if the AI can learn my personal relevance somehow so it can guess which messages I’d care about and which I don’t.

I'd be very careful about trusting an AI to summarize human communication particularly for work stuff. Things get forgotten and incorrect info gets posted (private Google docs link instead of shared link).

People also send screenshots and non text info like Slack calls. Is Slack going to listen in on calls as well?

I'm holding out for the chatbot that can do my meetings for me

I am trying to build a bot that will do just that to demonstrate this is exactly what we should NOT be doing.

My bot will be very verbose and intentionally annoying to the degree that responses will be fully evident of being written by "not me".

I found it quite useful for summarizing the last X hours of chat messages.

Provided you're willing to live with a ~20% chance it accidentally gives you a subtly misleading answer.

There should instead just be better tools for turning ephemeral chats into searchable evergreen content - tickets, documentation, reports, Q&As, etc.

That, of course, wouldn't get investors who probably don't even use the thing chomping at the bit. Everyone's gotta have an "AI story".

Just curious, what tools other than AI would accomplish this? Wouldn't pulling information from chats require contextual understanding (NLP)? I guess maybe it could auto-tag messages rather than summarize content?

You see, OP doesn't want AI, but a neural network seq2seq transformer ML model, trained on a vast amount of text data, say, now that would be something!

For example a tool that lets me take a group of messages and turn that into a ticket or a wiki page with a couple of clicks and keep references synchronized back and forth.

It feels very similar to a few years ago, where everybody and their mom thought they needed a blockchain. However, AI seems a lot more promising to me than the crypto industry ever did.

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