Is it possible to set up a chatbot that lets you DM a Zapier agent in Slack?

Hi ​@BlairAtPatreon,

Excellent question, I haven’t given that much thought before but totally see how it could be beneficial. One workaround I can think of is having your team-members create 1 person private channels and then you can configure the agent to work with those private channels. 

You can configure the agent to trigger on new message and respond within the private channel.

Hope this helps!

Please keep me posted if you can in fact DM the agent directly!

Thanks for your reply, ​@robintrainward! That’s too wonky of a workaround, but I do appreciate you offering it as an idea. 

Anytime :)

Hey ​@BlairAtPatreon 👋

It’s possible to trigger an agent from a webhook so maybe you could set up an app in Slack that would send a webhook to the agent whenever someone DMs it a question. 🤔 

With that approach you’d switch the agent to use a Catch Hook (Webhooks by Zapier) as its trigger, though would be best to test on a different agent so people can still use the current one while you’re testing this out. Then you’d need to set up the Slack app to send its events to the URL that’s provided in the Agent’s Catch Hook trigger. Check out Slack’s Events API documentation for details on how to configure it from their side: https://docs.slack.dev/apis/events-api/ 

If you give it a try, let us know how it goes! 

Thank you! I will!

yeah, you're basically asking for a Slack bot that forwards DMs to your Zapier agent and then shoots the reply back. totally possible, but the gotcha is Slack's event subscriptions and URL verification handshake.

honestly the cleanest workaround is to spin up a tiny Slack app with a bot token, subscribe to the `message.im` event, and pipe those DMs to a webhook that triggers your Zapier agent. you'll need a public endpoint to handle Slack's challenge request though. a cheap serverless function on vercel or cloudflare workers does the trick, it's like 20 lines of python or node.

the thing that usually trips people up is Slack's 3 second timeout for url verification. if your zapier agent takes longer to respond, you'll need to defer the reply with `chat.postMessage` rather than returning it in the http response. it depends on how fast your agent is.

are you handling any auth or just letting anyone in the workspace dm the bot?

The webhook route SamB described is the one that actually works, and the parts that trip people up are all on the Slack side.

Subscribe to message.im in Event Subscriptions instead of plain message, so you only receive DMs and not every channel the bot sits in. Slack sends a url_verification challenge first, and your endpoint has to echo that challenge value back or the subscription never turns on.

Slack also expects a 200 back within 3 seconds. An agent run takes longer than that, so acknowledge the event right away and post the answer as a separate chat.postMessage call. If you hold the response open until the agent finishes, Slack retries the same event and the person gets answered twice.

Ignore any event that carries a bot_id, otherwise the bot's own reply comes back in as a new DM and it starts talking to itself.

The last one is easy to miss: pass the Slack user id into the agent as the conversation key. Without it every DM looks like one long conversation and context from one person shows up in someone else's thread.