Slackagent

If you need an agent to send messages to your Slack channel and/or retrieve Slack messages to action, SlackAgent can help you.

Tip

If you haven't had a chance to read about how AG2's Communication Platform agents and tools work, read the overview first.

Installation#

Install AG2 with the LLM model provider and Slack platform extra.

pip install ag2[openai,commsagent-slack]

Capabilities#

SlackAgent can: - Construct and send a message to the configured channel. If a message is longer than the platforms permitted message length, they will split the message into multiple messages. - Retrieve the latest X messages from a channel. - Retrieve messages since a given date. - Retrieve messages since a given message ID. - Retrieve a message given its ID.

It will also automatically append Slack's messaging requirements to the system message:

40,000 character limit
Markdown
bold/italic/code
emojis
notification formats

This is on by default, but you can turn these off by setting has_writing_instructions to False when creating the agent.

In-built Tools#

The SlackAgent has two in-built tools that it will call upon as it needs:

Find out more about these tools and how you can add them to your own AG2 agents in the Slack Tools documentation.

Platform configuration#

Each agent is configured for a specific channel. This configuration is applied when you create the agent.

The SlackAgent require authentication (OAuth token) and channel details in order to send/retrieve messages.

Here are the steps to get a token:

Create an app, from scratch, at https://api.slack.com/apps
In your app settings, go to Features > OAuth & Permissions:
- Under “Bot Token Scopes”, add these permissions:
- chat:write (to send messages)
- channels:history
- channels:read (to access channel info)
- groups:read (for private channels)
- im:read (for direct messages)
- users:read (to get user info)
- files:read (to access file attachments)
- groups:history
- im:history
- mpim:history
With your app setup, now install it in your workspace, using the “Install App” menu, to create an OAuth Token.

To get the ID for your channel:

Open Slack in a browser
Navigate to your channel
Get the channel ID from the URL (e.g., …/C12345678)

Finally you need to add the bot to your channel:

In Slack, go to your channel
Type /invite @YourBotName, e.g. /invite @ag2commsagent

Now you should be good to go with your OAuth token, channel ID, and a bot on your channel ready to send and retrieve messages!

Code example#

Here's a simple example using the SlackAgent that gets the current weather and sends a message to a Slack channel to give them a weather forecast.

# Agents are available in the autogen.agents namespace
from autogen import ConversableAgent, register_function
from autogen.agents.experimental import SlackAgent

llm_config = {"model": "gpt-4o-mini", "api_type": "openai"}

# Our Slack credentials
_bot_token = "xoxo..."  # OAuth token
_channel_id = "C1234567"  # ID of the Slack channel

# Our tool executor agent, which will run the tools once recommended by the slack_agent, no LLM required
executor_agent = ConversableAgent(
    name="executor_agent",
    human_input_mode="NEVER",
)

slack_agent = SlackAgent(
    name="slack_agent",
    llm_config=llm_config,
    bot_token=_bot_token,
    channel_id=_channel_id,
)

# We get the registered tools and register them for execution with the tool executor
for tool in slack_agent.tools
    tool.register_for_execution(executor_agent)

# Weather function
def get_weather():
    return "The weather today is 25 degrees Celsius and sunny, with a late storm."

# Register for LLM recommendation with our slack_agent and for execution with our executor_agent
register_function(
    get_weather,
    caller=slack_agent,
    executor=executor_agent,
    description="Get the current weather forecast",
)

# Ask the SlackAgent to get the weather (using the get_weather tool) and then send a message out (using its SlackSendTool tool)
executor_agent.initiate_chat(
    recipient=slack_agent,
    message="Get the latest weather forecast and send it to our Slack channel. Use some emojis to make it fun!",
    max_turns=3,
)

Here's the message it sent: Slack output