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Troubleshooting Glean in Slack
Troubleshooting Glean in Slack

Get Glean to answer common questions in Slack

Cindy Chang avatar
Written by Cindy Chang
Updated over a week ago

Learn more about what Glean in Slack does and how to set it up here.

Why isn’t Glean answering a question in Slack?

There are many possible reasons.

1. Glean may not be set up properly in Slack.

  • Is Gleanbot enabled either across your workspace, or in the specific Slack channel where you’re noticing the issue?

  • Within Slack, is the Glean app added to the channel? See Slack’s instructions for how to add apps to a channel.

  • Is the channel an external channel? Gleanbot only responds in internal channels, in order to prevent private information from being unintentionally shared.

  • Is the Glean app set up with the correct scopes? The required scopes are listed in Glean Admin Workspace Settings > Apps > Slack > Setup.

2. The person who asked the question may not have access to Glean Assistant.

Glean only responds in Slack to users who have logged into Glean and have Assistant access.

3. Glean may not have a confident answer to the question.

By default, Glean only responds automatically when specific conditions are met, including:

  • The message is a question, and it’s posted at the channel level and not within a thread

  • Glean Assistant is able to generate a high confidence response, using the permission set of the person who posted the question

You can try asking the same question and tagging @Glean directly, or configuring Glean to respond to more questions by typing /glean configure in the channel.

4. Glean has hit a rate limit.

If Glean has received a high rate of questions, it may not be able to respond. Try asking the question again later.

5. The question is in a thread.

Glean currently only automatically responds to channel-level messages in order to avoid the potential noise caused by jumping into a conversation that is already happening between people in a thread.

Why is Glean taking a long time to answer a question?

It takes up to a minute for Glean to generate a full answer to a question and evaluate whether it’s worth showing. This is because generative AI applications inherently take time to produce responses.

Why aren’t emojis showing up when Glean is triggered?

1. Be sure to add Glean to each of the Slack channels you wish it to work in. See Slack’s instructions for how to add apps to a channel.

2. If emojis still don't show up, ask your Slack admin to check if reactions:write is added as a Bot Token Scope under https://api.slack.com/apps > Glean > OAuth & Permissions. If not, that scope needs to be added and the app needs to be republished.

How do I disable the suggestions for just one user?

Ask them to go to Your Settings in Glean and toggle off "Show suggestions for questions asked in Slack."

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