It's been a busy month here, and when we weren't trick-or-treating, we've created a chatbot that knows the docs of most web technologies (including Cord!), a crazy addictive game built on Cord, and a host of additions to the Thread, Message and Slack Connect APIs. Here are the highlights:
Next time you're debugging - try this first
Like a personal Stack Overflow guru, Ask Cord is trained to answer any question about most web tech — from React to Next.js, AWS, Tailwind CSS — and yes, also Cord's SDK. We built it because we needed it: We found ChatGPT is only trained on 1-2 year-old versions of most documentation sites. So, while Ask Cord is using GPT-4, we're feeding it the freshest docs for all tools. We opened it up because it's useful, and it's a great test case for building AI Assistants with Cord. And we open sourced the code so it'll be easy for you to add this into your app. Email us with any technology you need and isn't already there and we'll add it.
Can you outsmart 5 GPT-4 opponents?
A useful tech savant side-kick isn't all we built with GPT-4 and Cord. We went pretty wild with Halloween antics and built a game of Werewolf (aka Mafia) where you are trying to blend among chatbots who are looking out for human impostors. It's quite scary — we can see what Elon's AI scare is all about now. But it's also very addictive, and only a few people beat the bots so far... Try to defeat the AI in our GPT-4 chat game.
Make Cord's Slack integration your own
Your users can connect their Slack workspaces to your product with Cord. This is one of Cord's most unique and powerful features since users can then:
- @Mention everyone from their team — even if they don't have an account in your app. Users virally inviting their team into your app is an excellent way to drive seat expansion!
- Get notified in Slack when they're mentioned or someone replies to them in your app,
- and even reply to messages in your app from Slack.
If you don't quite know what we're talking about yet, this five-minute video about our Slack integration explains it best.
So far the only way to initiate the "Connect to Slack" flow was when a user starts to @mention someone in Cord, and clicks the button at the bottom of the mention list.
But now, you can add the Slack connection button anywhere on your app with our user.connectToSlack method in our JS SDK for chat. We always like to give developers more options to be in control and fully customise the experience in their app. If there's anything else you'd like us to add — let us know!
A ton of improvements to the Thread and Message APIs
We've heard your feedback. Yeah, we don't get "WTF is observeLocationData?!" either. So we shipped a ton of improvements to some of the most important APIs in Cord — the Chat Thread and Message API. We've
- Renamed existing functions like
observeLocationData🫣 toobserveThreadwhich returns the messages and status of a thread,observeThreadsto get real-time data about all the threads a user can see, andobserveThreadCountsto build live updating badges. - Added
observeMessageto fetch live message data from Javascript. - Added thread information to the payload of events like
thread:resolved - Added new filters to functions like
observeThread - And added a Javascript API to
createThreadso you can programmatically create new messages from the client side
Stay in touch
That’s it for this month! If you’re an existing customer and have questions for us, please get in touch, and be sure to keep up to date with our changelog. Also, check out last month's update if you don't already use the Cord CLI — it's become a super popular tool for developers and PMs.
If you’re new here, you can check out Cord and see if collaboration is right for your product, build with the SDK (for free!) or book a demo. And if you want to keep up with Cord and our ever-evolving product, follow us on Twitter and LinkedIn.