Changelog

Over the past few weeks, wee've been making under the hood improvementes to make room for the next iterations on StandupBot. This means better AI summaries, interaction improvements, and more awesome features.

One visible side-effect is that we cleaned up the slash commands.

• Improved slash command usability
• Added direct access to help and welcome messages
• Add a new examples command

Here is a peek at the improved help command:

How about some examples right from Slack?

These changes are much needed small UI/UX improvements that enhance the overall experience. But the under the hood changes will bring faster and better future updates. Excited for what's comming!

Over the past few weeks, we've been focused on refining and enhancing the overall experience of the app, with special attention to making it smoother and more effective, especially for larger teams.

As a result, meeting overviews are now clearer and easier to read. Here's what we changed:

• Overviews are more focused and digestible
• Improved support for teams with 20+ members
• No more duplicate participants, just expand names with a click

Here is a peek at the UI:

We’ve also upgraded our AI-powered summaries:

• It's now using the latest OpenAI 4.1 model
• Underlying support for multiple AI models (let us know if you want another, e.g., Claude)
• Better accuracy and relevance of summary generation
• Should now properly handle larger teams and longer responses

We hope these changes make meeting overviews and summaries more useful. Let us know what you think of the new layout or if you’d like support for another AI engine!

We’ve improved Slack Markdown syntax support in meeting responses. This change becomes effective on Oct 1^st. We already supported some Markdown elements in Slack, but we're now extending it to the web app as well. Any Slack Markdown (basic flavour) you use in Slack will appear in your responses, and on the webpage.

This is how it looks in Slack:

And this is how it looks on the webpage:

As a bonus feature, we've also added support for regular Markdown links 😉.

To maintain consistency, we will be deprecating the auto-formatted lists. Previously, if you provided a simple multiline response, it was automagically converted into a bullet list. Although convenient, it often broke the expected experience, and the formatting didn’t always align with your intentions, especially when using Markdown for other purposes. As a result, this feature will be deprecated on the same date, so please make sure you use Markdown lists going forward (just start the line with a dash).

These changes will be coming to email soon, so you can expect the same output in your email notifications. In the meantime, let us know how if this is working for you or if your text is not rendering properly!

An exciting new feature is now available for you to try! Automated AI summaries are now in public beta, available to all our users. If you’re an admin for your organization, just head over to Organization > Preferences in the top menu, enable the toggle and then click Update.

After this is enabled at the organization level, you can activate the feature only on the meetings you want to try it on (keeping it disabled in those you don’t). Just head over to the meeting’s settings page to control it.

When the meeting next runs, after everyone has responded (or the allotted time runs out), StandupBot will run everyone’s responses through the AI system and provide you a neat little summary along with the meeting ending notification. Check it out!

(By the way, you’ll also be able to produce summaries for any past meeting you want through StandupBot’s web app).

Some notes about this feature:

• We’re currently using OpenAI as an LLM provider but that might change in the future (we’ll be testing different options).
• No data is stored outside of StandupBot. We send anonymized responses and get a summary back without any remotely stored context.
• This feature is setup to work with English input only at the moment. We’ll soon be adding an option for international teams using other languages.

We’ve cleaned up the settings section for meeting response notifications. It was a bit confusing before, so now it’s easier to set things up as you want. When someone responds, you can choose between posting their response to the channel, to a thread or not sending anything (silent mode).

Out of office handling is much improved. Beyond a simple on/off switch to set yourself (or a teammate) as out of the office, it's now possible to select a date interval (starting now or in the future). With this, people are automatically excused from meetings over that timeframe (and will be set back as available when it ends).

Anyone can manage their own out of office period, and team admins are also able to manage it for other people in a meeting.

Widely distributed teams, rejoice! You can now set up your meetings to start at a given time on people’s local timezones (say “9am, local time”).

This means you now have full scheduling control, depending on your team’s location. You can either have meetings start at the same time for everyone (in a fixed timezone) or at a relative time, wherever people are, so they are prompted (and notified) to participate within their working hours.

We've started integrating AI to help you create summaries for each of your meetings (among many other things we have planned). This is still very much in Beta, so we're looking for testers and would love to have your feedback as we build on and grow AI-based features. Get in touch with us to get you started!

You can now export your team's past meetings in CSV and Excel formats for further analysis: just select a time period and your preferred format.

StandupBot is now friendlier during onboarding. The bot will welcome you with setup guidance and share a few examples of how it can be used. Type welcome or examples in a chat to find out.

When people respond to a standup, you can now set it up so that their answers go into a single thread with everyone's responses or they're posted as individual messages in the channel (or even no live notifications at all for full async behavior). You have total flexibility in how you share participants' responses as they happen.

StandupBot is starting to get smarter. You can now chat with it to execute most actions that were previously available as slash commands, and this will be the main interface for our AI features to come.

Easily see participation rates for your standups over time, both globally and on an individual basis. Check out who participated, who didn't, and who's out of the office, and how those trends are changing.

Navigation in your meeting's history is now much better. You can now go back and forth on meeting instances, skipping dates with no meetings scheduled. You can also go straight to a specific date.

One of Slack's staple features is being able to mention someone to get their attention. However, StandupBot uses a modal window with plain-text fields to capture meeting responses. While this is great to ensure a more consistent workflow where people reply to all questions in a meeting, it also means that mentions aren't available. Well, that ends today.

You'll find a new field at the bottom of the meeting response form (both in Slack and on the web), where you can select one or more people to ping. They'll be @mentioned in the update that's posted to the channel (and notified, depending on their settings).

As our name implies, the app got started as an async standup meeting manager. That has meant focusing only on meetings that happen every week: either every weekday or on specific days of the week.

However, we also want to support non-weekly cadences and other types of meetings and check-ins that product development teams have.

That's why we've decided to add a much more powerful scheduling system to meetings. You can now set up meetings that happen every given number of weeks or months (anchored in relative days of the month).

Essentially, the sort of recurring scheduling combos you typically have in your calendar. Take a look:

This is just a first step and we'll keep working on our user experience to better support different types of meetings. Hope you like it and share your feedback!

Yet another top requested feature is here. You can now configure standups with just 1 or to up to 7 questions*. The rule of 3 is gone. Long live the rule of 1-7!

What's really useful about this feature is that it enables many other types of meetings beyond standups like regular team check-ins, ice breakers and status/mood updates.

*"Why 7?", you may be thinking. Well, because at 8 it felt more like a survey, so that's where we drew the line 🧑‍🎨. Seriously though, if you need more than that, we'd love to hear from you.

This month we worked on a bunch of under-the-hood improvements to make the app feel snappier. But the thing that you'll notice the most is the fresh new look for the interface.

The overall layout is essentially the same but we made a few small user experience enhancements throughout the app. We're excited to have made this refresh, because it's going to enable us to work much faster towards a ton of features we have planned. Can't wait to share them with you!

We're really excited about this one. You can now use StandupBot in your Slack Connect channels, letting you involve external teammates and stakeholders in your standups! 🎉

Everything works the same as with any other standup, but StandupBot is now able to join a Slack Connect channel and let people from outside your organization post and read standup updates.

A long requested feature is here. You can now add automatic reminders to your standups to make sure your teammates don't forget to participate.

In usual StandupBot fashion, it's super simple to use. You just toggle the reminders option for your standup, and the bot will send a reminder before the standup ends to anyone that hasn't yet posted their update. That's it. On or Off – no confusing settings to deal with.