Hey @bentossell thanks for your comments! It's like IFTTT for on Slack :) ---> ….. And so much more! The bot is powered by a Flow XO workflow with as many actions (workflow steps) and different apps as you like. Also - in terms of looking to integrate other platforms ... Absolutely! A major point about Flow XO bots - they are cross platform, so there will soon be support for other team communication platforms too. We have public roadmap at https://trello.com/b/8qKlTlhE/fl... to discuss ideas and think about what comes next. Here's a great use case: Customers tell us they love the workflow bot builder and way workflows are constructed. It’s important to us that workflows are quick, easy and fun to build and use. We see the real value here in having information at your fingertips – a use case we love is relaying information to customers at blistering speed, rather than keeping them waiting. As an example - Passing this command: /xo balance john@example.com “John Doe” The bot in the background is configured to call up our integrated finance app, and use the arguments passed – a customer’s email and name – to retrieve the customers balance and provide it back right in the Slack window. Instant information in the Slack window that can be given to the customer who’s on the phone – no more hold music whilst the finance app is called up. The customers wants a copy invoice as a result? /xo invoice john@example.com “John Doe” “Unpaid” Here I’m calling up a new bot – one which will take an additional argument "Unpaid", collect up all the unpaid invoices and email them out to the customer through a third integration, perhaps Gmail…. Of course without leaving the Slack window. Where do we see this going? We can see a future where everyone uses a ‘command line’ to make their lives easier and optimize their business processes – with a Flow XO bot doing some heavy lifting in the background. We have an absolute focus on the quality of Flow XO workflows, bots and service integrations and want to provide a sublime experience. We want to create a wonderful user experience for everyone that honors us with a sign up! @thecudafish @fiznool

@tweetsbybooth @example @thecudafish @fiznool Awesome :) love the detail and I completely agree that the future is command line style! Do you offer easy 'out-of-the-box' bot integrations that allow users to quickly and easily link up x, y and z services to do a, b and c. Like popular recipes on IFTTT. That could be really useful!

@bentossell That's an excellent idea! We are working on creating a set of app-specific 'power packs' - so a pack of e.g., 5 popular Trello bots will be instantly available - and of course tweakable and shareable to other Flow XO accounts. They'll evolve over time as they're shared around... that's really exciting! :) Another development we're working on - you'll be able to generate 'lists' in the Slack window, based on an underlying e.g., CRM account. So I might ask for all accounts with the name "john@example.com", and get back a list of all those related accounts, along with the email addresses, and CRM-specific 'Account ID'. That last piece of information - the e.g., account, person or company ID is particularly powerful - because there's no way of getting that currently unless there was a trigger of some kind specifically for that person. So instead you'll be able to pass an ID in directly to the trigger of the workflow, rather than having to get it from a trigger. It can then be used to eg, Add a Note to specific contact that we're chatting to - a transcript of the chat. I can also relay or email that reference directly back to the customer, for their future reference. Would love to discuss any other ideas! @example @thecudafish @fiznool

@tweetsbybooth @thecudafish @fiznool Yeah I think there are loads of awesome things to do in this space. I do worry about the level of complexity that some bots will bring though. For non-technical users dipping their toe into command line world is one thing but have complex interactions with a bot can confuse them. Its key to make them really easy to understand on the base level I think. Out of the box solutions will be good. Also explainers around those solutions so users can follow along if they are struggling. Also these bots should be starting with making simple tasks even easier, and then seeing how users behave before layering in more complex tasks.

@bentossell Completely agree - We'll be writing up comprehensive support / help docs with use cases on our blog, and we always love to hear from customers on support@flowxo.com. As you suggest we'll start with some really simple, efficient use cases - for instance starting a set of recurring tasks against a deal. @thecudafish @fiznool

Thanks for the post @_jacksmith :)

@alirtariq But only after it's swung by the grocery store to pick you up some milk and eggs! We agree that bots are the future! In business, in IoT, you name it. Are you a Slack user currently?

@thecudafish yup, all day, errday! I love slack but to be honest, haven't been utilizing bots all that much so far. I'm yet to find an instant where I find the need for a bot to help out (apart from silly fun ones like giphy). I suspect this is the chasm that needs to be crossed by me in order for this technology to truly make a measurable difference in my life.

@alirtariq Are there any use cases you could see yourself using with our Slack bot?

@thecudafish tbh, it's all a bit like writer's block for me at the moment. It'd be nice, perhaps, to do a quick image search from Slack since I occasionally have to look for high quality content to put together quick designs of things. In the long run, though, even that wouldn't save me a tremendous amount of time/effort. Guess I'm going to have to mull this over a bit more.

@tribaling you can indeed. When you create your workflow, select the 'Private' button at the top of the workflow builder. You have the option to share the workflow via Twitter, Facebook, Email or through a snippet that can be embedded in any web page. Anybody else can then click the resulting link to install a copy of the workflow.

@tapefinder What kind of workflow would you imagine? They fill out a typeform? Submit a contact form on your site? After that, what would you like to do with the data? Gimme some specific thoughts and we can likely write up a blog post with that use case! Would you like it a bot for slack or a standard workflow?

@thecudafish I'd like to have some kind of unintrusive widget in tapewrite.com (think zendesk) and when someone interacts with it it either does something autonomously or warns my team on slack to take action.

@tapefinder by interact would you mean like submit a form?

@tapefinder great. Why don't you email me and we can help work you through something. I'd suggest either something that can submit to a webhook, or use our new email parser. We'll get you set up! Thanks!

Hey @dcsan - Thanks! That's an interesting idea re: piping around the data directly in Slack. However, the idea here is that the Flow XO workflow powering the Bot will do the piping behind the scenes - we're just passing in some parameters in Slack to run the workflow. So in this case "unpaid" would be e.g., an option in a select field in a Flow XO workflow task, but we're giving it as a value to the bot which will process it for us, rather than configuring the task manually. Running that first bot could return a list of all unpaid invoice IDs - which you can then extract a value from the returned list to pass into the next Bot to send the invoice in question. Get me through live chat on the Flow XO homepage (https://flowxo.com) or on support@flowxo.com if you'd like to chat further! Steven

@tweetsbybooth @dcsan @flowxo Piping does seem like a cool feature for us geeks that can remember dozens of commands, but for building apps out for internal business use (like in Slack) or for external customers, modelling the workflow works better visually. I like flow because I learned it myself in the space of an hour of playing, without watching any of the videos, just inspecting the pre-built flows. Then getting a demo I could share around my company was another hour, building something specific and useful and deploying it to a website. I could train business-types in how to build workflows and then just focus on building additional integrations to our own stack. I have been needing a base platform like this for the past year, and have been struggling with other tools. Dunno how I missed Flow before, but now I'm happy.

@timothy_joh @dcsan @flowxo Great feedback thank you. Would love to talk about your specific use case / the industries your external customers are in. If you'd like to send me an email to support@flowxo.com, would enjoy understanding further :)

@weheartscott We agree 100%, Scott! Slack is just the beginning for this bot platform, we have more messaging services on the way! Our goal is to build a bot platform builder that integrates smoothly with the rest of our workflow automation philosophy! Thanks for the kind words.

@tapefinder @bentossell We're always happy to hear about great use cases - drop us a line at support@flowxo.com and tell us what you're doing with your workflows!

@tapefinder thanks for the vote of confidence, Borja! Two reminders: When you sign up, use the code PH2016 to get a free month of any paid plan, and additionally, feel free to reach out to me directly at Mark.cuda@flowxo.com with any questions or reach support at support@FlowXO.com

@ourielohayon Somewhat similar! Since you can build the bots in our workflow builder, it allows you to customize every aspect of the bot, it's response, etc. as well as integrate it with all of our integrations! Are there any specific use cases that would interest you? We are working on some ready-made recipes currently! :D Thanks for the kind words.

@thecudafish to be frank i have a hard time getting started because i have no ideas of recipe. do like IFTTT: offer some simple recipe ideas or enable others to share them and put them in a directory

@ourielohayon And that's a great idea we're working on currently! What other web apps do you use regularly in your work?

@shashankkr9 Right on! Email me at mark.cuda@flowxo.com if you want any help getting a few bots created! What's great is that this isn't just for one to one bots, but full automation workflows that can be triggered and manipulated via bots!

@fiznool @tweetsbybooth @imdrewlittle I think this answers your question, Drew! Tom, it's been a pleasure working with you! PH, Tom, Steven, and the rest of our development team has poured heart and soul into this release, and this is just the beginning. We're stoked. :) And to all PH users, don't forget about our special promo code, PH2016 for a free month of any paid plan! However, bots and all integrations are available on all plans, including our free plan!

Hey @imdrewlittle Sure! We're just about to release a Paquebot integration in fact. For any other suggestions - any other apps you'd like to see supported? - please fell free to contribute on our roadmap at https://trello.com/b/8qKlTlhE/fl...

@tweetsbybooth thanks for the update! really looking forward to it...a lot of potential in this space.