Hello, World! Meet TOM!

Over the past couple of months, we’ve been working hard on developing one of our first products, a time off manager in the form of a friendly Slack integrated chatbot.

Lo and behold, TOM!

http://tomhr.io

TOM is meant to help teams manage personal time off by simply having a conversation with a bot. In doing this, TOM doesn’t intrude in the team’s daily activity, because all the communication is done solely via private messages. We still have a long way to go, but this initial release proves that an app like this can be very helpful.

Curious how TOM works? The idea is simple: once the Slack team admin adds TOM to the Slack account, imports users and sets up the teams and time off policies, every member of the team can start communicating with TOM. This first version is only integrated with Slack, but we are working on extending integrations to other communication platforms used by teams around the world.

Functionality-wise, TOM helps with:

• Taking sick days;
• Taking vacation days;
• Seeing scheduled time off;
• Getting an overview of the team’s time off status;
• Notifying users in real time when teammates get time off;
• Approving or rejecting time off requests (team managers’ feature).

You can see TOM performing live and in motion in this video:

Creating TOM was a real challenge, both figuratively and literally, because this demo version has been submitted to the AWS Chatbot Challenge on July 18th, so our team had a pretty set in stone deadline for this proof of concept to be running. We have our fingers crossed until we get the results (it makes it a little difficult to type sometimes, but we manage). It was our first participation in such a challenge, so we asked Ana, who organised all the TOM work, how she perceived this entire experience:

The experience of working on the TOM project has taught me so much about collaboration, curiosity, struggle, experimentation, innovation, and continuous learning.

From experiencing first hand the process of ideation to design and then implementation, deciding together the core functionalities, and finally bringing TOM to life through the AWS Chatbot Challenge journey, it was a hell of a ride every step of the way.

Give TOM a try by accessing his website, or just say ‘hello’ on Facebook or Twitter.

We’ll continue to improve this version and work on integrating TOM with multiple platforms, such as Skype, Facebook Messenger and Jira, so we’d love to get any kind of feedback from users. Hit us up and tell us how your TOM experience goes.