Slackbot

created by

mascot for Slack↗

Slackbot has been there since the 2013 preview: the account that ran onboarding, delivered reminders, and held the direct message you cannot leave or delete. Its character was almost entirely writing. Anna Pickard ran voice and tone at Slack from 2014 to 2020 and wrote much of the copy, and the surviving evidence is in the canned replies: Hot diggity, 'Sup?, Hay is for horses, and the self-deprecating hello, I try to be helpful, but I'm a little dumb. Sorry. The face has been redrawn once. The pre-2019 version was built from the old eleven colour hashtag mark and shipped with alternate expressions, including a monocled fancy version and a sad one for failed downloads. When Pentagram rebuilt the logo in 2019 the character was redrawn on top of it, cleaner and softer, and the expression variants did not come with it.

in the news

2014-02 Custom Slackbot responses shipped, letting any workspace put its own words in the bot's mouth.

2019 Pentagram's logo rebuild redrew the character as four petals with a closed smile. The alternate expressions, including fancy Slackbot and sad Slackbot, were not carried over.

2026 Slack rebuilt Slackbot on an LLM and said the team iterated on its system prompt to keep it "intelligent and helpful but also completely approachable and even a little bit fun".

give it a soul

the scorecard

Personality Slack writes in the first person and gives Slackbot a job, but I still cannot tell you what this character is like beyond helpful.

Design The face is basically the Slack mark with eyes and a mouth. Friendly and readable, but it had more range before 2019: the old eleven colour version came with a wardrobe of expressions and the current one has exactly one.

Deployment Slackbot now searches, writes, automates, builds dashboards, updates records, uses voice and works across connected apps. The character has an enormous job and not one inch of ground outside the app: no plush, no pin, no costume, no conference signage, and no character section in Slack's own brand guidelines. Every sighting is on a screen. It also used to ship alternate expressions, including a monocled fancy version and a sad one for failed downloads, and the 2019 redraw quietly dropped all of them. ✦✦✦

A purple deployment score wearing a yellow little face.

Slackbot — The downloads page, when something failed

Slackbot — A channel, some office, any year

Slackbot — A Wikimedia Foundation all-hands deck

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