Your New Digital Coworker

Something exciting is happening in technology right now that only happens once every decade or so — a maturation of technologies, a stirring of ideas new and old, and a combining of elements that at first seem disparate, but when combined, fit together like peanut butter and chocolate.

Messaging and notifications. Software automation. Always-on connected devices. Machine intelligence. These elements can be combined to form a very interesting new type of application: the digital coworker — a piece of software that works along side you at your job and participates in the day to day activities of your company as an active and engaged member of the team.

What if you had a coworker who could take the most boring, repetitive and mundane tasks off of your plate and perform them with tireless dedication, endless patience and perfect accuracy?

This is the vision we have for the product we are proud to launch today: Howdy, a powerful workplace automation tool for your Slack team.

Digital coworkers don’t just offer you a passive menu of icons to choose from. They ask you what you need, and then they do it for you.

“If we believe machine intelligence will make our applications smarter, they might as well just start talking to us,” says Roy Bahat of Bloomberg Beta, our lead investor. “That’s why conversation is the new interface. Bots on Slack are the first step, and Howdy is beginning to open the door to them.”

Today, you can add Howdy to your team to automate one of the most repetitive and time consuming tasks a team faces: meetings. By doing things that humans can’t — like talking to many people at the same time — Howdy can super charge your team. It will by ease the process of information distribution, make your decision making process more transparent, and make your meetings shorter.

Here’s what it looks like:

A team member asks Howdy to start a meeting. Howdy works in public channels where everyone can see the results of a meeting, or in private messages, where only the team leader can view the results:

Howdy speaks in private to each participant of the meeting, using friendly, natural language. Participants converse with the bot, and their responses are collected into a report:

“When new platforms like Slack emerge there is this moment when you start to see all of the amazing stuff that gets created on top of it,” says Peter Rojas of Betaworks, another of our investors. “And what XOXCO is building with Howdy is so useful and so clever that we knew we had to get involved.”

With our launch today, we hope to usher in a Cambrian explosion of applications and services built into and on top of messaging applications like Slack. Building upon Howdy’s core ability to listen, speak and act on the intent of its human counterparts, we envision a world where messaging bots deliver all manner of content and services to their users. In the months ahead, Howdy will become increasingly customizable and intelligent, and will connect to a diverse set of messaging platforms.

We want to provide this core set of abilities to bot makers of all varieties. No longer will developers have to wrangle APIs, hosting providers, message queues and scripting libraries — Howdy’s robot brain will provide the underlying tools and technologies that will allow any bot to come online and get to work. If you want to build a bot or design an app that lives in messaging, get in touch now!

You can sign up to add a Howdy bot to your Slack team today on our site, Howdy.ai. Follow us @HowdyAI for news.

You can also join us and 250 other developers for a vigorous and diverse discussion of the Slack application ecosystem in our open Slack team, Dev4Slack.

Monstrous piles of thanks are due to the amazing groups of investors from whom we raised our seed fund: Bloomberg Beta, True Ventures, Betaworks, Outlier and some of the smartest, best angels in the world.

Thanks to the XOXCO team of hackers in Austin, Texas for making it all real. You guys rule, and I owe you a taco.

And thanks most of all to my brilliant and talented cofounder Katie Spence, without whom none of this would be possible.