An AI assistant as a Slack App
This is a Flask web app so it must have a valid url. If you want to test it out locally you can use ngrok. I have tested it using replit but without deploying it.
It should run with Python 3.7+. (I have used Python 3.10)
$ python -m venv pySlack # create a virtual environment if necessary
$ source pySlack/Scripts/activate # activate the virtual environment
$ pip install -r requirements.txt # install the paackages
$ python main.py # run the Flask appOnce it is installed on your Slack channel simply mention the bot (in my case I called it AssistantAI, very clever I know) and it will respond to you in a thread.
To integrate (the old version) the App on Slack I have mostly followed DavidAtReplit guide but I modified it a little using the slack-sdk and slackeventsapi documentation.
The code in main.py works fine, however as of 05/16/2023 it seems like the bot continues to answer to the same prompt without being asked to. I have not figured out the full reason for such a bug.
I have tested it on another workspace with a different account. Notice first that a single message is sent twice, seconds apart. Furthermore it seems that it stops if I don't ask the assistant a question but give justa a statement "this is a test". However, if a question ("what is nodejs?") is asked it keeps answering minutes after it already. Note I did not send from Slack 5 messages but only 2.
Disabling the chatgpt response and just printing the event_data I get the following
Again the "event" was registered twice but there was only one response from the bot! what is going on?
Apparently if the call to OpenAI API takes longer than 3 seconds Slack resends the POST request. see this issue on slackeventsapi
It seems like I resolved it. It looks like it was an issue of acknowledging the message/event from Slack within the 3 seconds.
Instead of using slack-sdk and slackeventsapi I switched to using only slack-bolt. I created a new main.py and renamed the old one old_buggy_main.py.