Remove Bot Mention Requirement
It seems as though currently all bots only work if you @mention them, so my assumption is that this is a requirement of the api used to develop the bots.
Many people from my organization are used to IRC/Slack style bots where an explicit @mention isn't required for bots to parse a message and respond.
Sometimes there is fun functionality that can be added for a lot of bots and having to @mention a bot really detracts from the user experience of some bots.
I can also see this getting out of hand when using a lot of bots, so this would probably be something that would go well in tandem with this suggestion: https://microsoftteams.uservoice.com/forums/555103-public/suggestions/18646108-bot-permissions-contract
Austin Brown
shared this idea
This item is still on the backlog. I’ve received no further updates yet about this topic. I will continue to bring your feedback to the feature team.
-Warren
25 comments
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Anonymous
commented
MS Teams recently stopped automatically appending the bot's @mention when replying the bot's messages. This just became a major block, since now the user has to manually mention the bot on every reply to its messages. This feature is being specified on this document and it's not working anymore:
"Note: For convenience when replying to bot messages in a channel, the bot name is prepended in the compose message box automatically."
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Bernhard Scholze
commented
Hello,
anyone listening here?
This is a requirement for serious two way integration ...
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Dominik Hölzl
commented
Hello!
Is there any progress on this?
We would need this feature to be able to track all content which was created by our teams app through search extension and unfurl action.
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Greg M
commented
This is a critical feature that prevents Teams from being a serious consideration for replacing Slack, so it's kind of shocking it's still on the backlog. This feature enables *so much* other functionality.
Something that would cut down on traffic and processing is if it could be triggered only if a message matched a particular regex. For example, only match /\b#\d{2,6}\b/ to trigger only when someone mentions a ticket number. There can obviously be false positives, but a major use of these kinds of bots is to connect systems like this, so someone can say "Hey can someone help me with #2345?" and a bot will summarize that ticket with a link, and in those cases pretty much the first thing you do when handling a message is run a regex match, and discard the vast majority of messages.
This example also highlights the massive limitation the "bot mention" requirement imposes. No one is going to type "@ticketbot Hey can someone help me with #2345?".
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Ajit Samanta
commented
Any update on the feature? Is it possible to skip the @mention by programmatically?
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Nataliia Kondratiuk
commented
updates?
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Eli
commented
Any update on the status of this?
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Corbin Taylor
commented
Agreed!, add the option to invoke the bot with a prefix such as '!'
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davs
commented
This should be the highest priority since it is a critical feature!
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Florian B.
commented
Is it still on backlog? If this is the case, when will the feature be available?
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MattC
commented
I've raised a ticket which could solve the JIRA ticket # appearing in a message and having it automatically converted to a hyperlink. This could be a simple Search & Replace setting for Owners to set up.
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MattC
commented
Agreed. We need some way to detect ticket numbers and automatically hyperlink them to the respective system(s). It'd be nice if that was a built-in feature which didn't need a bot.. but if we went down the bot route, the bot would need to be able to read all user messages & potentially alter them.
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Anonymous
commented
this is a MUST HAVE.
I don't want to @jirabot project-####. I just want a bot to unfurl the ticket info when it is mentioned in a chat.
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Aubrey Stearn commented
Also pressing for an update here, teams isn’t a viable option without this functionality :(
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Andrew L
commented
Is there an update or prediction of when this feature will come off of the backlog list? Slack and a number of other chat programs have this feature. We've moved from slack to teams and now have lost a fair amount of bot functionality as we've now had to try to retrain the users to @mention the bot. As you can imagine it's easier to retrain a bot than a person.
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Gabe Williamson
commented
holy cow yes, several of our in-house bots on a different chat system listen for sale ids or jira tickets and add links to the correlated page. This extra bit of context was super helpful and fairly ingrained in our daily workflows. We'd love to be able to reimplement this bot on teams but can't right now. Threaded conversations make this format even better!
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Justin Lynch
commented
I am part of a team that provides real-time support for representatives at a call center. Most of the time, we provide url's to our knowledge base system that resolves their issue. I want a bot that can track what url's we share to help find trends. It would be great if the bot could "watch the conversations in the channel" so we could use that to track those urls and provide us with that data.
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Anonymous
commented
The lack of this feature is currently stopping us from adopting Teams for a Not for Profit Organisation's project.
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Anonymous
commented
We really need a way for a bot to connect to a team/channel without having to expose a public callback. We would prefer the support of a chat client so that we can use hubot completely inside our firewall and can see all messages.
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Olivier Jacques
commented
Indeed. Multiple use cases to allow bots to listen to activity in a room:
- Augmented conversations - add details when a bug or user story is mentioned
- Conversational User Experience: with the current implementation, I am not sure that conversational user experience (https://docs.botframework.com/en-us/, https://www.luis.ai/home/index) can actually be implemented. I have not tried though.