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Warning

Please be aware that Slack Admin permissions are required to establish this connection. Ensure you have the necessary rights or coordinate with your Slack Admin to proceed.

Overview

Dust's integration with Slack allows you to synchronize data from selected public Slack channels. Dust agents can retrieve and utilize conversations and information shared within these channels to provide more relevant and contextual responses.

Setting up the Connection

Initial Connection Setup

1. Initial Connection by a Slack Admin: A Slack Admin must initiate the connection process. This is done through the Dust platform under Knowledge > Connection Admin > Connections. Select Slack from the list and click Connect.
2. Authorize Dust in Slack: You'll be redirected to Slack for authorization. Here, you must allow Dust to access your workspace information. This step ensures that Dust can read messages from your public channels.

Slack Authorization popup.

Dust modal, to select the data you want to sync with your Dust workspace.

3. Select Channels for Synchronization: After authorization, you'll return to Dust. A modal will appear, allowing you to select which public channels you want Dust to synchronize data from. Later on, you can change the channels selection using the Add / Remove data button.
4. Enable Dust Slack bot: From the Slack Connection, toggle right the Slack bot to enable it for your workspace. To avoid information leaks, only members of the Dust workspace can ask questions to agents in Slack.
5. @Dust Slack bot Addition: The @Dust Slack bot will automatically be invited in the channels you've selected for synchronization.
   You can invite the Slack bot to private channels to ask questions, but the data from the private channels won’t be synchronized.

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Warning

Remember, the @Dust Slack bot presence in a channel does not necessarily mean all messages from that channel are being synchronized. Only the channels an admin selects in the Add / Remove data section will have their data ingested by Dust.

Managing Permissions

• Adopt a shared-by-default approach—share everything except for the data you want to exclude from Dust.
• Admins can update permissions directly from the Slack connection in Dust by clicking on Manage Permissions

Updating the connection

• Admins can synchronize or unselect any Slack public channel by clicking on  Add / Remove data from the Dust Slack connection panel.

Link an agent to a specific channel.

To ensure your agent answers by default whenever a user summons @dust, set up your agent as Shared or Company, then toggle right the Slack integration setting and select the channel you want to link to your agent.

Summon any agent from synchronized channels.

If you don’t want to link one specific agent to one channel, you can use the ~ or the + sign to talk to any shared or company agent directly from Slack.

@dust ~agentname
or
@dust +agentname

Refresh Rate

A few seconds: Changes to channel selections in the Add / Remove data modal are reflected within a few seconds or minutes, depending on the size of the data. The actual sync of new messages from Slack channels is almost instantaneous, meaning Dust will have access to new messages as soon as they are posted.

Slack Connection Specificities

Data Synchronization

• Dust synchronizes text messages and information from selected public channels.
• Private channels, direct messages, and external files are not accessible by Dust.
• Messages from other bots (eg: Slack workflows) are not synchronized with Dust.
• When messages are not threaded, Dust points to the window of the channel message that represents the chunk whose URL is the first message. To optimize Dust synchronization and retrieval of Slack messages, we recommend formatting Slack threads as is: first message with the title and then create a thread.

Labels

Dust syncs the name and id of the channel from Slack messages and include them in the document above the content itself. They are accessible as channelId:xxxxxx and channelName:myChannel.

Labels will allow for additional filtering on data sources selected on the semantic search tool.