Commands and reactions

Managed Slack and Teams treat leading-slash text as ordinary message content. Reaction handlers let an agent respond to lightweight feedback without treating every emoji as a new chat message.

Managed commands are not dispatched#

The generated Slack manifest does not register slash commands, and managed Teams does not interpret /name prefixes. A message such as /triage customer therefore reaches onMessage or onMention as normal text.

defineChannelCommand, commands, and onCommand remain available for direct adapters that emit native command events. They do not opt a managed Slack or Teams Channel into command routing.

Route mentions and ordinary messages#

Register onMessage for ordinary provider messages. A bot mention selects onMention when that handler is registered; otherwise the mention falls back to onMessage. Non-mention messages select onMessage, and one inbound message runs exactly one of those handler paths.

The current generated manifest subscribes to ordinary channel, private-channel, group-DM, and direct-message events in addition to app_mention. A Slack app created from an older manifest may need the current event subscriptions and bot scopes applied, followed by an app reinstall.

Handle incoming reactions#

Known Slack shortcodes and Teams reaction tokens are normalized to portable names. The portable outbound set is thumbs_up, thumbs_down, heart, fire, eyes, refresh, thinking, and tada.

channel.onReaction("eyes", async ({ added, thread, user }) => {
  await thread.post(
    added
      ? `${user?.name ?? "Someone"} marked this response for follow-up.`
      : `${user?.name ?? "Someone"} removed the follow-up marker.`,
  );
});

Omit the emoji argument to receive every added and removed reaction:

channel.onReaction(async ({ emoji, rawEmoji, added, thread }) => {
  audit.record({ emoji, rawEmoji, added });
  await thread.post("Reaction recorded.");
});

emoji is the normalized value when the SDK recognizes it. rawEmoji retains the provider token for custom or unmapped emoji.

The generated Slack manifest subscribes to reaction_added and reaction_removed. Managed ingress routes reactions on bot output and on user-authored roots and replies back to their existing managed conversation; reactions on unrelated workspace messages are ignored.

Attach a reaction handler to one message#

Use Message.onReaction when only one posted component should react:

import { Message, Section } from "@copilotkit/channels/ui";

export function FeedbackCard({ answerId }: { answerId: string }) {
  return (
    <Message
      onReaction={async (emoji, reaction) => {
        if (reaction.added && emoji === "thumbs_up") {
          await feedback.record(answerId, reaction.user?.id);
          await reaction.thread.post("Thanks for the feedback.");
          return;
        }
        await reaction.thread.post("Reaction update received.");
      }}
    >
      <Section>React with 👍 if this solved the problem.</Section>
    </Message>
  );
}

Register FeedbackCard in createChannel({ components: [FeedbackCard] }). Surviving a process restart also requires a durable StateStore, because the SDK must reload the component snapshot that owns the callback.

Add or remove the bot's reaction with the delivery-scoped reference from the current message or transcript:

channel.onMessage(async ({ message, thread }) => {
  await thread.react(message.ref, "eyes");
  await thread.unreact(message.ref, "eyes");
});

The portable set works on managed Slack and Teams. A provider-native string is allowed when your code branches on the native provider: use message.platform in a message handler or reaction.thread.platform in onReaction. Unsupported values fail explicitly.

See the command reference and Message reference for the complete handler shapes.