Howl Slack

An awesome program that reads out loud messages from slack channels.

What is Howl Slack ?

HowlSlack is a bot that watches a channel's messages and read out them louds. We use it at work to make announcements through offices ! Each office has a small Raspberry PI connected to speakers which runs Howl Slack.

We connected some endpoints of our API to Slack through Zappier. For example when someone orders something we have a message sent to Slack and then Howl Slack reads it and everyone hears:

🔊 Foo bar just ordered <something> for <that> amount of money ! Good Job !

There is pretty fun use cases for this ! As you can connect a lot of things to Slack but also you can type yourself messages.

🔊 John, you're fired
🔊 Just kidding

Setup

Slack

Go to

https://YOUR_SUBDOMAIN.slack.com/apps/manage/custom-integrations

1. Click on bots

2. Add a configuration

3. Create a bot

4. Get your bot token

This the token you'll copy and paste in config.json

{
  "SlackToken": "PUT YOUR TOKEN HERE"
}

5. Add the bot to a channel

Assuming you called your bot howl-bot, create a channel or add it to an existing one.

Hardware

There is some pre-built binaries here.

At work we launch it on a Raspberry PI connected to speakers.

AWS

Download the aws-cli for your system. Then configure it

aws configure

The app use the Polly service from S3.

More info on pricing:

https://aws.amazon.com/polly/pricing/

But it's cheap.

Run it

For Raspberry (or ARM based systems)

./builds/howl-slack_arm

For x64 systems

./builds/howl-slack_unix

Build

Build the project:

Go version needed: > go1.11.2

make deps
make

Then just run the binary.

./howl-slack

The program will output the messages in real-time from the slack channel.

Credits (icon)

Icons made by Freepik from www.flaticon.com is licensed by CC 3.0 BY

License

Howl Slack is licensed under the GPLv3 License, sponsored and supported by HyperMoon.

And special thanks to FIZIX.