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Show HN: An open source alternative to some of Slack AI's premium features

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Show HN: An open source alternative to some of Slack AI's premium features

#1

Post by meetbryce »

The official Slack AI product looks great, but with limited access and add-on pricing, I decided to open-source the version I built. Especially for all the communities on Slack that would have to convert to paid and buy the upgrade to access the official SlackAI product/add-on which is not going to be financially viable in most cases.

There's no plan to sell anything, just something I built as a way to learn some new tools that I thought others might get use out of.

The repo is a ready-to-run slack app that provides thread summaries and channel overviews on demand using OpenAI (heavy lifting done by gpt-3.5-turbo and a touch of gpt-4) and some standard NLP analysis. Anyone technical could easily swap in Claude or Ollama (and i'd welcome the pull request, it's been on my to do list!).

There's a link in the readme to a blog post I wrote sharing more about the how/why if you're interested.

I'm a product manager by day, so it's been fun to do some real coding again.

Show HN: An open source alternative to some of Slack AI's premium features
github.com

Re: Show HN: An open source alternative to some of Slack AI's premium features

#4

Post by nadermx »

meetbryce wrote: post #3
gliptic wrote: post #2

> I decided to open-source the version I built in September 2024. I think this is the most impressive part!

oh no... my time travel secrets! i better fix that

Why did you not show up to Hawking's time traveller party?

Re: Show HN: An open source alternative to some of Slack AI's premium features

#5

Post by tithe »

meetbryce wrote: post #3
gliptic wrote: post #2

> I decided to open-source the version I built in September 2024. I think this is the most impressive part!

oh no... my time travel secrets! i better fix that

As far as "Show HN" goes, this is called "burying the lede".

Re: Show HN: An open source alternative to some of Slack AI's premium features

#6

Post by pants2 »

This is great, congrats on open-sourcing. The (now $20/user/mo we've been told) Slack AI is really not all that good in my experience, so it shouldn't be hard for you to do better by just spending a little extra $ in API credits.

That said, the Slack API limits third party apps from accessing chat history of private messages, so any implementations like this are artificially limited. In addition, if you're hosting something for your company to use, it would realistically need to take into account user permissions to make sure the AI isn't sending them data they shouldn't have access to. That could be tricky to implement correctly.

Re: Show HN: An open source alternative to some of Slack AI's premium features

#7

Post by godelski »

Kinda off topic, but I know a lot of people here use keybase for verification, but don't they have a slack alternative that's both free and private? (Assuming zoom didn't kill either of those aspects) Anyone use it as an actual slack replacement?

Re: Show HN: An open source alternative to some of Slack AI's premium features

#8

Post by meetbryce »

pants2 wrote: post #6

This is great, congrats on open-sourcing. The (now $20/user/mo we've been told) Slack AI is really not all that good in my experience, so it shouldn't be hard for you to do better by just spending a little extra $ in API credits. That said, the Slack API limits third party apps from accessing chat history of private messages, so any implementations like this are artificially limited. In addition, if you're hosting so…

thanks @pants2!

oh wow. i should have guessed taking it off the pricing page meant the price went up, not down.

this works in private channels, but not in DMs. i think that's okay given the likelihood of things getting to much for manual parsing in a 1:1 context.

if you've got the time/inclination, I'm interested to hear more about what you're getting at with the permissions & access piece

Re: Show HN: An open source alternative to some of Slack AI's premium features

#9

Post by freeqaz »

godelski wrote: post #7

Kinda off topic, but I know a lot of people here use keybase for verification, but don't they have a slack alternative that's both free and private? (Assuming zoom didn't kill either of those aspects) Anyone use it as an actual slack replacement?

Is anybody using Zoom as a Slack alternative? Or Keybase as an alternative? Or are you asking if there is something else?

Perhaps I'm lacking context but I couldn't figure out your question and I'd like to help you find an answer!

Re: Show HN: An open source alternative to some of Slack AI's premium features

#10

Post by meetbryce »

godelski wrote: post #7

Kinda off topic, but I know a lot of people here use keybase for verification, but don't they have a slack alternative that's both free and private? (Assuming zoom didn't kill either of those aspects) Anyone use it as an actual slack replacement?

definitely off topic haha. i've got no idea though
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