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Comment by chuckdries | Hacker News Reader

> one of our more structured approaches involves a chat bot that helps schedule lunches among Stripes who are least likely to know each other

Anyone know if this chat bot is available for Slack? I kinda want to install it for our team

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(I'm the author.)

Check out https://www.donut.ai/ -- the company behind it is up to some neat stuff.

We love Donut. At least half our company uses it on a weekly basis to grab coffee.

That page says nothing about what Donut actually is/does.

> Spread trust and collaboration across your organization by pairing up team members who don't know each other well.

It literally just DMs two random people suggesting they should get coffee.

As a severe introvert, this is terrifying.

When we used to before, it only worked for people who joined a certain slack channel.

Besides, despite what the name will tell you, this isn’t some sort of powerful, all controlling AI enforcing coffee dates on everyone. It would be set up by a company that would want to use and and would either talk about it and/or have faced the “issues” with introverts.

It’s just a Slack bot. It takes humans to use it.

What a strange and somewhat patronizing answer. I'm pretty sure craftyguy realizes there's no Skynet controlling people's lives and forcing them to have coffee. It's giving the tools to companies to allow them to "face the issues with introverts" that is alarming to those of us who want to preserve serenity in our free time.

LOVE Donut!!! We're too busy to use it effectively though... do you think it could auto schedule 1:1 meetings with the people in the donut conversation?

It's a super useful bot! Connects you with team members you're least likely to work with (not sure how it knows this, i'm on the comms side). And it puts time on your calendar so you two can grab lunch together. Afterwards, the bot asks how it went! And you can give the team feedback through the bot.

Does it allow you to reject the 'lunch date'?

Yeah, you don't have to set it up to actually do the scheduling. It can just connect the two in a private message and say something to the effect of, "You two figure out when to meet this week."

I could not think of a more horrific bot.

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