Turn Slack conversations into documentation, instantly
Tags: programming, management, career, productivity
Published: 2022-10-17 23:59:05

Today, we’re excited to announce [Ollie AI](https://tryollie.app/). Ollie AI turns Slack conversations into documentation, instantly.

Developers lose 5 - 10 hours/week answering and asking engineering questions. Yet, the context from these conversations gets documented less than 5% of the time. Engineers find it too tedious to document this information and even if they did, nobody would be able to find it because Confluence and Google Drive search sucks!

In remote or hybrid companies, most of these conversations happen over Slack. Unfortunately, Slack does a poor job as a knowledge-base for teams. Slack multi-keyword search almost doesn’t work, particularly when looking for answers across message threads. Additionally, a lot of organizations have limited Slack message retention periods ranging from 1 month - 2 years – imagine your documentation disappearing every couple months! Finally, most engineering conversations aren’t searchable by your engineering team, anyway. 65% of the time it’s hidden in Slack private channels or DMs.

So, how does Ollie AI turn Slack messages into documentation? Ollie AI provides 2 tools: a Slack app and a desktop app. With the Slack App, a developer can right click a message and the thread will automatically get populated in the Ollie AI platform. This works in private channels, DMs, and public channels. We recognize that not all Slack conversations happen within one message thread and can be scattered across multiple messages. Because of this, Ollie AI has created a desktop app which allows you to hit Shift+Ctrl+S to screenshot a series of messages. Ollie AI will turn the screenshot into text and index it.


![Image description](https://dev-to-uploads.s3.amazonaws.com/uploads/articles/nl1x7v3445204mpis5eu.gif)

To get your questions answered, you can DM Ollie or @mention Ollie directly in Slack. When you ask your question, Ollie will answer it given the documentation that has been populated in the system. We use some of the latest NLP technology to ensure quality results. If Ollie can’t help you answer your question, it will help point you to people in your organization that might be able to!

![Image description](https://dev-to-uploads.s3.amazonaws.com/uploads/articles/rmfqltd02a3adwm1he66.gif)

One of the areas that Ollie AI is most effective is in new-hire onboarding. When new engineers join a company, they’re often too shy to ask questions in a large public channel. Instead, they prefer to DM their mentor directly. These questions and answers almost never get documented and, as a result, the cycle repeats for the next new-hire that joins the company. With Ollie AI, members of the conversation can export the question and answers that happen in DMs with one click of a button so that the rest of the engineering team can benefit. The time it takes for a new-hire to onboard will automatically come down.

Ollie AI is rapidly onboarding new engineering teams to use the product. If you’re interested in supercharging your engineering team’s productivity, [join our waitlist](https://tryollie.app/) and we’ll reach out to you shortly!