Introducing new features that make Unblocked even more helpful in Slack

Dennis Pilarinos

October 16, 2024

For most software developers, Slack is both a critical part of their workflow and a distracting menace.

The real-time aspect of Slack leads everyone to believe that asking questions in channels or direct messages is the fastest way to get an answer. But while everyone wants to be helpful, no one likes being interrupted.

That’s why we built Unblocked for Slack, and today we’re expanding the ways teams can get fast, accurate, and relevant answers to their questions in Slack with expanded Slack context in answers, auto responses, support for private channels, bot DMs, and channel summarizations.

Even more Slack conversations included in Unblocked’s answers

Slack tends to be where the majority of a team’s conversations happen. Until today, Unblocked only surfaced Slack conversations related to Pull Requests in its answers. Now, Unblocked will use and surface conversations from all your connected channels to answer questions. With full channel ingestion, critical context is no longer lost to the scrollback and everyone gets to benefit from understanding just how a decision was made.

Auto Responses to your questions in Slack channels

Many teams set up dedicated support channels for parts of their organization - often by function or feature teams (for example: #ask-devops, #ask-qa, #ask-frontend etc).

These channels are well intentioned, but don’t actually solve the problem of getting help quickly. People who use them are often left waiting for answers, and the teams responsible for providing support feel constantly interrupted.

Now with auto responses, you can leave the answering to Unblocked.

Whenever a question is asked in a Slack channel that Unblocked has an answer for, it will respond like the teammates you love working with. The answer will be fast, accurate, and will include a few extra items, like relevant code snippets and links to the sources it used to generate the response.

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Teams who participated in the beta of this feature say that it not only sped up their engineering teams, but that it also helped code-adjacent teams, like product management and customer support, get the context they need without disrupting their peers in engineering.

Once you’ve enabled auto responses for your team, you can confirm that Unblocked is connected by asking, “Is Unblocked listening? ”.

Support for Private Channels

We’re also making Unblocked available in private channels. This was a commonly requested feature that we’ve worked closely with our beta customers to develop, ensuring that we deliver on everyone’s expectations for data privacy and security.

Unblocked works the same in private channels as it does in public ones. You can ask questions directly by @mentioning Unblocked, and also benefit from auto-responses, channel summarizations, and more.

Most importantly, the contents of your private channels remain private. Unblocked will not leverage or expose the contents of your private channels in its responses to members outside of the private channel.

Direct Message with the Unblocked Bot in Slack

Sometimes you have an important question to ask, but don’t want to do so in a public channel. Incognito Mode is a feature built around this scenario that’s available in the other Unblocked clients (the web dashboard, the mac app, and the IDE extensions).

We’ve now brought Incognito Mode to Slack with bot direct messages.

Whenever you have a question that you want to keep private, you can simply DM the Unblocked bot. You’ll get the same helpful answers as you would if you asked in a more public setting, and the question won’t appear in your Team’s Feed.

One last thing

After you’ve connected Unblocked to your Slack, jump into one of your channels and ask @unblocked summarize this channel. Unblocked will respond with a recap of the last 100 messages that have taken place in that channel.

We’ve found this feature to be super helpful when you’re getting up to speed with incident response channels and other channels that are high volume, and especially when you’ve been away from your keyboard for a time.

Using Unblocked for Slack

Unblocked for Slack is currently available to customers on our Business and Enterprise plans. If you’re currently using Unblocked in Slack, go to your Unblocked dashboard, click on Data sources, then open your Slack settings. From there, you’ll need to install the updated version of the app to use these features. Once the app is reinstalled, you can turn on auto-answers for your team, and add Slack to your private channels.

You’ll also want to be sure to connect your Slack user account, and to have your teammates do the same, as Unblocked personalizes its answers based on your identity.

More details on setting up and using Unblocked in Slack are available in our documentation.

If you’re not yet using Unblocked, get in touch with us to try our new Slack integration alongside all the other features we have available.

Unblocked T-shirts!

We’d love to hear your feedback as you use Unblocked in Slack, and are available to answer any questions that may come up.

As always, if you haven’t yet received an Unblocked t-shirt, we’d love to send you one. <a id="chat-with-us" href="#">Message us</a> with your t-shirt size, mailing address, and phone number, and we’ll put a package in the mail ASAP.

If you and your team have feedback on Unblocked, including requests for additional features, <a id="chat-with-us" href="#">please let us know</a>.