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Anona’s Slack app answers questions in the channels you choose, from the memory space you point each channel at. Access follows your Anona space membership, not the channel. Binding a channel invites the people in it to that space, and the bot answers each person as themselves once they accept. Somebody who has not accepted is not answered, and nothing in the space is shown to them.

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Install

  1. Open Integrations in the dashboard.
  2. On the Slack row, choose Connect.
  3. Approve the install in your workspace.
The app asks for nine scopes and no more: app_mentions:read so it can see questions addressed to it, chat:write so it can answer, commands for the /anona command, channels:history plus groups:history so it can read the thread a question was asked in, channels:read plus groups:read for the channel’s member list, users:read to tell people from bots, and im:write to send you an invitation by direct message. It does not ask for users:read.email, and that is deliberate. Matching a Slack user to the Anona account with the same address would be the obvious shortcut, and it is a way in: a workspace admin can change somebody’s email address. Your identity is proved by a private message plus a signed-in Anona session instead, and neither half is derived from the other. Installing does not make anything readable. Until you bind a channel, the bot is silent everywhere.

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Bind a channel

Run this in the channel you want to use:
Slack replies with a link, visible only to you, that opens the dashboard with the channel already filled in. Open the Slack row and choose:
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string
required
Which memory space this channel reads from. Everyone in the channel can see anything the bot answers from it.
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string
required
The key the bot presents. Revoking it stops the bot in this channel.
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string
Which model answers here. Leave it on Inherit from the space to follow the space’s own default.
Binding the same channel again edits it rather than creating a second one.

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Change or review a channel’s settings

On the Slack row in Integrations, click any bound channel. Its settings load into the form below: space, API key, and model. Change what you need and choose Save changes, or Cancel to leave it as it was. The channel ID is fixed while editing. A channel’s ID is what identifies the binding, so changing it would not move the binding, it would create a second one against a different channel. To stop the bot in a channel entirely, use the delete button on its row.

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Ask

Mention the bot in a bound channel:
The answer arrives in a thread on your message. It is the same synthesis POST /v1/reason returns, so it costs credits from the organization that owns the workspace, at that model’s rate. Answers arrive formatted for Slack, so bold, lists, links and code blocks read the way they should rather than showing their markup.

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Asking inside a thread

Mention the bot part-way through a thread and it reads the conversation before answering, so “so what did we land on?” works without restating the question. The thread is used only to understand what is being asked. The answer still comes from the memories in the bound space, and nothing in the thread is recorded. Asking never writes. Saving a thread is a separate and explicit action, described further down. A very long thread is trimmed to its most recent messages, and the bot says when that happened rather than answering from half a conversation as though it were the whole one. One question runs at a time per channel. Ask a second while the first is still working and the bot says so rather than queueing it.

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Connecting your Anona account

Optional, and it does not change what a channel answers. Run this in Slack:
Follow the private link it replies with, and the Slack identity that ran the command is connected to whichever Anona account you are signed in as. Today that does one thing: a thread you save is attributed to you, so the memory records who captured it. Running /anona link again from a different Anona account moves the connection. Linking does not filter what a channel returns, and deliberately so. A channel answers from the space it is bound to, for everyone in it. Filtering that per person would mean posting one person’s private memories into a shared channel, which is a leak rather than a feature.

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Permissions

Your Anona space membership is the permission boundary.
  • The bot answers only in channels someone deliberately bound.
  • It answers you as you. Your question runs against your own access to that space, and it costs your organization’s credits.
  • Somebody who has not accepted their invitation is not answered at all.
  • Answers are public only when everybody in the channel has accepted. If even one person has not, the answer is shown only to whoever asked, and a copy is sent to them by direct message. Once they accept, answers go back to being posted for the channel.
  • Only an owner or an admin can connect or disconnect a Slack workspace.
  • You can only bind a channel you are in, and you can only bind a space for writing if you can write to it yourself.

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Accepting an invitation

When a channel is bound, everybody in it gets a direct message from the bot with a link. Opening it signs you in to Anona and connects your Slack identity in one step. That is the whole of the setup for a person. If you ignore it, nothing breaks. The channel keeps working for everyone who has accepted, and your colleagues’ answers simply stay private to them until you do.

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Checking where you stand

Run this anywhere:
It tells you which Anona account this Slack identity is connected to, which space the channel reads, and whether answers here are public or private right now, naming who has not accepted yet. It shows the email address on purpose. Connecting the wrong account is otherwise silent: everything keeps working, against the wrong spaces and the wrong credit balance, and nothing would ever tell you.

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When it cannot answer

The bot always replies, even when the answer is that it cannot:

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Costs

An answer is a reason call, billed to the organization of the person who asked, at the rate of whichever model ran. For an ordinary team that is the organization that owns the workspace, because everybody is in it. Somebody using a personal Anona account spends their own credits. Leaving the model on Inherit from the space means a channel follows the space’s own default, so you set the model once rather than per channel. Reading is the only thing the bot spends credits on. It never writes.

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Disconnect

Disconnect on the Slack row revokes the workspace and removes its bindings. Your spaces and memories are untouched. To stop the bot in one channel only, unbind that channel instead.

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Seeing why a channel is answering privately

A channel that has gone quiet because one person never opened their invitation looks, from inside Slack, exactly like a broken bot. So the Integrations page says which it is. Each bound channel shows:
  • Public or Private, and the reason. Private reads “answers are visible only to whoever asked, because 2 of 9 have not accepted their invitation”, naming them.
  • Resend invitations, which re-invites everyone outstanding. An invitation that expired or was declined is reissued, so ignoring the direct message for a fortnight is recoverable without rebinding the channel. Owner or admin only, because it sends a direct message to real people.
  • A warning when somebody in the channel uses an Anona account outside your organization. They can read the space once they accept, but their questions spend their own credits. Invite them to the organization instead if that is not what you want.
/anona whoami reports the same thing from inside Slack.

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The endpoints behind the page

Everything the Integrations page does is also callable with a dashboard session token (never an API key: 401 session_required): /v1/slack/events, /v1/slack/commands, /v1/slack/interactions and /v1/slack/oauth/callback are Slack’s to call, not yours.

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Saving a thread to memory

Two ways, both saving the whole thread rather than one message: a decision lives in the back and forth, and keeping only the conclusion throws away the reason for it. Ask the bot. In the thread you want to keep:
Also understood: save this, record this chat, remember the above, store this discussion, and similar. The instruction has to start with the verb, so a question like “did we ever record that decision?” is still answered as a question rather than quietly saving something. Or use the menu. Open the ... menu on any message and choose Save to Anona. Two things have to be true. The channel has to be set to Read & write on the Integrations page, and you have to have write access to the space yourself. The channel setting is a ceiling rather than a grant, so a space you can write to can still be bound read only into a wide channel. The default is read only, because saving changes what the space recalls: consolidation synthesizes across the saved conversation and whatever your agents have written, together. Saving the same thread twice does nothing the second time. The bot says so rather than making a duplicate.

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The hourly cap

Each workspace can save ten threads an hour, and the bot says so when that is spent. The cap is real rather than arbitrary. Extraction runs on a queue shared by every Anona customer, and a thread is many pieces of work in one click, so a team importing a backlog at once would hold up everyone else’s uploads. It will rise once that queue is per customer rather than shared.