EmoBond for Slack

Bot that adds right emojis so you connect emotionally

1 follower

Bot that adds right emojis so you connect emotionally

1 follower

EmoBond is an emotional Slack bot that helps teams connect emotionally by setting their tone of voice through emojis. Bot guesses and adds suitable emoji to your message Build emotional bond right in Slack, never let your messages be misunderstood again.

Launch tags:Productivity•Messaging•Robots

Launch Team

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Metflix

Maker

Dear ProductHunters, I am Max, emotional CTO from EmoBond. I will be frank, this is my first tech startup & I am humbly seeking feedback from this great community. I was always fascinated by how teams can connect & operate online even on distance. I have been running online design workshops, educational hackathons & courses. As we wanted to start a scalable company together with my co-founder we researched how teams communicate in e.g. Slack. As I believe in humanness of work and communication interest caused the topic of communicating emotions online & bonding online. We recently joined School Of Startups by Y-Combinator which made us do the bolder move on going here, to product hunt. Emojis & emotions are taboo in corporate culture, according to our research. There is no scientific good reason why communication in corporate teams is often dry and unemotional. However emotional climate impacts greatly employee retention & motivation. We built this chat bot for larger corporate teams to help them use emojis more deliberate & easy. Help us fight dry emotional climate! We hope you will have great fun using it. Really hope to hear ideas on how to improve our product from Product Hunt community Cheers, Max 🙇

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7yr ago

Raycast

@maxim_zavadskiy1 interesting product. Worthwhile goal, but I'd love to learn more about your research: "Emojis & emotions are taboo in corporate culture, according to our research." I think this is very contextual and not universal; I'm curious why you think people working in a "dry emotional climate" would want this. Do you think that they don't know how to express emotion digitally or how to use emoji? Or do you think there's another reason why emotions are suppressed in their environment? Do you think that emotionally repressive environments are likely using Slack or more likely to use Microsoft Teams?

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7yr ago

@maxim_zavadskiy1 there seems to be a chasm between the statement "I believe in humanness of work" and building a bot to express emotion for people...? Tell us more about how you got to the idea?

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7yr ago

Metflix

Maker

@samrye_enspiral Great point actually. I believe that technology should connect us better. We noticed that sometimes distributed teamwork is easier to organize than on-site. We organized online hackathons (https://globalmilhack.com) and its easier to recruit right team for right challenge online, even if it's distributed. Which got us thinking that in theory we could create online university that will be more collaborative & bonding than traditional onsite one. Does it give some reasoning? On work culture, since we can't stop that people work more & more remotely why not make better tools to empathize/understand context (instead of loads of clues you get by f2f communication). Out of two evils I optimized for lesser one (technology makes it easier to add emojis). I would be happy to get some ideas how to make the bot even more humane from this

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7yr ago

Metflix

Maker

@chrismessina Thanks a lot for great feedback :bow:! The research is mostly based on insights from managers we talked with. Some report that emojis are "too strong" (think of star eyes). Some prefer to make a call / f2f meeting whenever the "question does not imply binary answer". Then perception of emojis as "that social networks / youth thing" & their ambiguity https://www.inc.com/anna-hensel/... seems to contribute too. Right point on the Microsoft Teams, we are considering porting there

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7yr ago

@maxim_zavadskiy1 @chrismessina this is a good point, taking into account that MS Teams are getting similar to Slack and, thankfully, changing corporate communication styles...we have been told numerous times by the corporate workers that they experience hard time understating their colleagues' emotions behind the message and also expressing their own. Reason often seems to depend on the culture in the organisation - if it promotes sincerity and discreetness in the emotions, then the workers usually have a better time expressing themselves. However, usually it is still not the case still.

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7yr ago

Great product! Can you make this available as a keyboard for smartphones in general? I want to use this everywhere!

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7yr ago

Well, many times conversation need to had in person in order to hear tone, see facial expressions and feel energy but if you have remote teams in diff time zones and you are unable to connect on phone or Video calls then emojis can help to ease communication! It’s my personal opinion.😄👍🏼

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7yr ago

Metflix

Maker

@kt_kt_kt Thanks for the insight. We really hope to make emoji so usable that it could work in case video calls are unreasonable

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7yr ago

Video calls ( as any type of meetings) take a bit of time, so we are trying to figure out how we could use emojis so well that there wound't be a need to call that often

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7yr ago

Metflix

Maker

@aleksandra_bodekhina Yep, think of 9h+ time difference some teams have

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7yr ago

VidProposals

Don't you think Emojis are bit informal and would not go well in corporate culture ?

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7yr ago

Metflix

Maker

@hammad_akbar Aha, that's the question we were pondering quite a bit and I think we found an answer. At the moment most corporate cultures probably won't, that's true. However we identified some wanna-be-cool managers that want to start making their communication slightly more informal. We could start with corporate-friendly emojis that are quite neutral & upgrade as the culture evolves in the company. We are still in process of finding which emojis will work best & I am happy to hear any suggestions <3

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7yr ago

@hammad_akbar as corporates are trying to be startups-like, the times are changing

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7yr ago

@hammad_akbar I don't think this is the case anymore. Companies/teams nowadays have several different communication channels, Slack being one of the least formal, at least in my experience. Slack is generally great for quick and informal communication between peers, and for that reason I don't think it really matters. Most of us know which channel of communication to use for any given discussion - something that is serious will generally be discussed over phone, email, or f2f anyway. At the end of the day, no one is obligated to use emojis (or any other form of expression, such as giphys), but for those of us who do, we might see that adding some character to our communication builds a greater peer connection than just a string of words. To your point, this is completely dependent on the type of environment you work in. I work for a fairly large tech company and I've seen emojis used by nearly everyone from new grad hires all the way up to leaders in the business. We're by no means a startup, but we understand that times have changed and we have done our best to adapt and ensure everyone is comfortable being themself.

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7yr ago

Metflix

Maker

What more features you like to see?

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7yr ago

@maxim_zavadskiy1 would be cool if EmoBond could suggest to respond with emojies to existing messages. Because the bond is created mostly when someone does that, not when the creator of the posts adds emojies to his/her own posts.

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7yr ago

Metflix

Maker

@dima_syrotkin Would it be through reactions or as normal message reply?

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7yr ago

@maxim_zavadskiy1 I guess through reactions? Usually people don't "message" emojies only

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7yr ago

Metflix

Maker