Truffle | Creating an AI Enhanced Slack Community Experience

Deploying AI tools to enhance an online community can be a huge value add for its members, turning organic conversations into useful documentation that helps answer questions members have, automatically. Superpath, “the ultimate resource for content marketers”, is a product created by Jimmy Daly and his team that aims to be cutting edge. They’ve got a ton of resources to help out anyone working in the content marketing space, as well as a growing freelance marketplace. Blog posts, podcasts, video content, everything you’d expect from, well, great content marketers. They’ve also got a Slack community with a lot of user generated content, and they needed a way to capture and surface that was user friendly and easy to setup.

The Superpath Slack boasts a member count of over 15,000. For free, members can post in several channels that are relevant to the content community, but the real action happens in the private, members-only channels. With over four years of Slack conversations, the Superpath private channels have a wealth of information that is fully organic and community created, with experts and newbies alike engaging in great discussions around SEO, strategy, advice, and marketing. With so much knowledge to wade through, the community needs a little more than just a plain Slack search to find what they need.

This is where Truffle’s AI comes into play. Adding Truffle to certain channels allows Superpath to extract and summarize the years of conversations contained in them, using the power of OpenAI and GPT-4. Here’s how it works: simply install Truffle to any channel, public or private, and Truffle will immediately get to work digging through the years of conversations, extracting the most important parts of a thread, summarizing it, and storing it in a search engine. The user’s question and the most likely answer contained in the thread are extracted, as well as the user that asked and answered the question. This information is added to Truffle’s internal searchable knowledge base to be useful later.

Quickly search the knowledge base

Truffle will answer questions automatically by default when its added to a channel, but in Superpath’s case, they use the knowledge sourcing feature to pull knowledge out of channels and into their knowledge base. This has resulted in nearly 5.5K threads that are now part of the Superpath corpus, now fully indexed, searchable, and available to use in automatic answers! Then, in their private #search channel, users can ask questions that are answered instantly using this wealth of knowledge. By doing this, the community can continue to have discussions while Truffle scans for content in the background to save for later, while keeping the AI question answering to a specific channel.

Automatic question answering in the #search channel

Here’s how Truffle enhances the community experience:

Knowledge Extraction and Summarization: After installing to a channel, Truffle starts analyzing conversations, extracting questions and answers from the Slack content, and identifying the participants. These summaries make up Truffle’s internal database, turning casual conversations into a searchable, useful knowledge base. Threads that it has summarized and indexed are marked with a 🧡.
Searchable Knowlege Base Quickly search through thousands of items using powerful semantic search.
Automated and On-Demand Question Answering: Truffle’s AI answers questions by default when added to a channel. This is optional, and can be changed based on the goal of the community. The question answering and knowledge gathering capabilities can be configured on a per-channel basis.
Quality Control and Trust-Building: When someone asks a question in the #search channel, Truffle uses GPT-4 to synthesize a new answer to the question, based on what it knows from past community answers. The quality of the answer can be voted on by anyone and accepted by the question asker, adding human input to the AI output and rating the trustworthiness of the answer.
Deep Dive into Answers: For those seeking more context, Truffle offers an “Explain this Answer” feature, showing the underlying threads and discussions that the answer was sourced from.

Superpath is enhancing their Slack community with the power of AI, capturing important discussions and making that knowledge easily available to their members. You can check out Superpath’s Slack at https://www.superpath.co/community. If you run a Slack community and are interested in Truffle, we are offering 15% off the monthly plan, so your community can benefit from AI question answering for just $50/month. You can try Truffle out for free by going to https://try.truffle.bot.