Upwave’s productivity bot for Hangouts Chat is now available! At its core is an AI that understands natural language. It is instructed not to spam users with unwanted messages.

The Upwave productivity bot for Hangouts Chat is a two-way AI bot. You can talk to it either in private or in a chat room. It will help you and your team to create, delegate, and list tasks (cards) directly inside the chat. You can also configure the bot to send you private notifications when something important occurs in Upwave that involves you. A chat-room will never get spammed with messages that don’t matter to you!

Natural language

The bot understands natural language and can sometimes follow up with a question if something is unclear. For example, a command like @Upwave create Remember to schedule meeting with Sofie tomorrow, will ask you on what board you’d like the card “Remember to schedule meeting with Sofie” to be added. “Tomorrow” will be understood as tomorrow at noon, but the bot understands a wide range of dates, for example, “tomorrow morning” or “next Tuesday”.

Another very useful feature is to ask the bot to find information. For example, you can ask the bot to list your own or a colleagues’ tasks for the upcoming week or what they did yesterday. This is perfect in scenarios like a remote status meeting.

Personal Assistant

Sending a direct message to the bot will initiate the personal assistant. The assistant will notify you privately on important events happening in Upwave. For example, it will let you know when one of your tasks is due or if someone sent you a High Five. It will never post to a chat-room where others may receive unwanted information. You can, of course, configure the assistant to stop sending specific types of notifications or turn it off altogether.

Preview of Upwave boards and cards

Linking to Upwave cards and boards naturally in a conversation has never been easier. You can ask the bot to preview a card or board for everyone to see by simply pasting in the URL.

The card will then be displayed for all in the room (or privately if you’d like) with action buttons to assign/unassign yourself or complete it.

Try it out

Trying out the bot is easy if you already have a G-Suite account. Head over to https://chat.google.com and find the bot by typing @Upwave in a chat room or as a Direct Message. If you do not have an Upwave account the bot will create one for you with a free 14-day trial.