@rrhoover Our big goal is to make a bot that anyone can customize to be _their_ bot, so that all teams can enjoy the benefits of automation and digital assistance without having to, you know, build a bot. What we're launching today focuses on improving meetings. Once you invite Howdy to your team, you can request that it run meetings for you. Howdy will reach out to each participant of the meeting _in private_ and ask them a set of questions to prepare for the meeting. All of the answers are collected and delivered back to the team so that they can spend face to face time solving problems and making decisions. This can be used for standard stand-up type meetings, or you can build custom meetings from inside Slack, just by talking to the bot. We think this is going to save a lot of time for a lot of teams. And in the months ahead, we're going to add a lot of additional ways Howdy can be customized and scripted. We want to create a world where bots are everywhere!

@stevesi right now training is explicitly user driven - users tell Howdy what to do and say. In the future we are hopeful to learn from user behavior around timing, reminder behavior, etc to tune the bots ability to provide "just in time" help

@arlogilbert wish I had a chance to talk with you at that weird event. Let's get coffeeB

@johnnyxu I think we are pretty different than Clara actually - we don't really schedule the meetings. Rather, the bot runs meetings inside Slack and takes notes!

@benbrown Ah, gotcha. Thanks for clarifying that. I didn't get that sense from reading the copy on your website. I saw "bot" and "meetings" and jumped to Clara. The prompt customization and meeting summary is pretty interesting. I'd like to hear how you guys approach privacy. What happens when I add Howdy to a channel?

@johnnyxu we are very concerned about security and privacy. Howdy only pays attention to messages directed at the bot itself - no other messages are logged or stored, including any messages sent before the bot joins.

@johnnyxu and all messages we do store are encrypted!

@jordanrushing not yet but very soon!

@benbrown @jordanrushing Awesome sounds great. So I added this to our team's Slack. When should I expect it to be activated?

@dustinwstout I wonder if that will ever happen. I like to compare bots to apps. Apps are built for dedicated use-cases and built with interaction models that support those use-cases. I think the same goes for bots. However, when the singularity hits we'll probably see one bot to rule them all :P