sllvn//

Using Slack at home

2015-12-13

After reading about Facebook Messenger’s complete disregard for user privacy, I moved communication with the girlfriend over to Slack. We are apparently not the first to do so.

We’ve been happy with the experience. Search, totally absent from FB Messenger, is great. Multi-channeled communication is quite useful for home communication (we separate messages by topic: #home, #groceries, or just #general chat). Additionally, we’ve spun up a chatbot to manage shared lists (e.g., groceries) and tell us when our morning bus is arriving.

It would be great to have more contextual awareness in the Slack app, however. Location, especially, would be nice to have for more relevant chatbot responses. “Where’s my bus?” is a lot more natural than “Where’s the 28 southbound on 34th street?”

I’ve shared my hubot scripts at https://github.com/licyeus/home-hubot.