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You can interact with your teammates without even leaving Slack!

How it Works

To interact with a teammate in Slack, you’ll need to make them an account. But because they are not real people, you aren’t going to make them a regular login; you will do it by making a Slack app, one for each teammate. But don’t worry! It’s much easier than it sounds and just takes a few clicks.

Working with your teammate in Slack

You can work with teammates in Slack just like regular employees on your team. You can @-mention them, invite them to channels, and DM them.
To interact with your teammate, you need to either @-mention them in a channel or DM them. If they’re in a group chat, they won’t automatically listen to every message, only to ones explicitly sent to them.
Anything you can do in a regular Teammates Chat you can do in Slack: have a conversation, assign work, check on the status of things, and more.

Setup

Create Slack App

First you need to create a new app from Slack’s web interface. It’s easy — you can get all the configuration details right from the Teammates app. A “manifest” is a bit of JSON that describes your teammate. We generate it for you and it will look something like this:
{"display_information"=>
  {"name"=>"Doc Brown (Teammate)",
   "description"=>"Mad Scientist",
   "background_color"=>"#1F2937",
   ...
  },
  ...
}
  1. In the Teammates app, click on your Teammate’s profile and then click Chat in Slack. This will display the manifest JSON custom made for your teammate.
  2. Visit Slack Apps page and click Create New App
  3. Select From a manifest
  4. Select the Workspace you want to add the app to (likely your company’s workspace)
  5. Copy-paste the manifest JSON from the previous step into the Manifest JSON field and click Create
  6. Click Next and the Create

Add Your Teammate’s Avatar

It’s no fun to see a generic avatar for your teammate. Let’s make them look good!
  1. On the page after you created the Slack app, scroll down to Display Information
  2. Back to the Teammates app… click your teammate’s avatar to see the hi-res version. Right click and Save Image (or File > Save Image) to download the image.
  3. Upload the image of your avatar
You can always find the Slack app configuration page again here

Install your new Teammate Slack app

  1. From the app configuration page, click Install App in the left sidebar
  2. Click Install to install it to your workspace
  3. Click Allow when prompted
  4. You should see a screen with a Bot User OAuth Token. Copy this value. It’s likely 50+ characters long starting with “xoxb” or similar

Configure in Teammates

Lastly you need to update the Teammates app with the new Slack app’s OAuth token.
  1. If you didn’t copy the Bot User OAuth Token from the previous step, you can find it again from the OAuth & Permissions section in your app’s configuration page
  2. Go back to the Teammates app and paste your token into the Bot User OAuth Token field and click Save
That’s it! Go @-mention your teammate in Slack and have them introduce themselves!