Vannevar is the Hypothes.is project's helpful Slack bot.
Vannevar is a hubot and is designed to be deployed on Heroku.
You can test Vannevar by running the following. You need a local redis instance running first (Vannevar uses redis for basic persistence).
% bin/hubot -n vannevar
You'll see some start up output about where your scripts come from and a prompt.
[Sun, 04 Dec 2011 18:41:11 GMT] INFO Loading adapter shell
[Sun, 04 Dec 2011 18:41:11 GMT] INFO Loading scripts from /home/tomb/Development/hubot/scripts
[Sun, 04 Dec 2011 18:41:11 GMT] INFO Loading scripts from /home/tomb/Development/hubot/src/scripts
vannevar>
Then you can interact with Vannevar by typing vannevar help.
vannevar> vannevar help
...
You can add functionality to Vannevar by writing scripts. Read up on what you can do with hubot in the Scripting Guide.
You can also add scripts from hubot-scripts to hubot-scripts.json,
or scripts from any published NPM package (see the hubot-scripts GitHub
org for a start) using external-scripts.json (you'll need to npm install --save these first).