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.

Teams messages use the same onMessage and onMention selection after managed ingress normalizes the activity.

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.

Teams messageReaction activities are normalized through the same handler. Classic reactions such as Like and Heart, plus recognized modern emoji tokens, map to the SDK's portable names.

Outbound reaction add/remove uses Microsoft's public-preview reaction API. Managed setup verifies that API for the tenant and remains not ready when the tenant cannot use it.

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.