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Your team reaches your coworker where they already work — Slack, email, or Telegram — without opening CogniAgent.

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What it does

A coworker nobody can reach is a coworker nobody uses. Message channels put yours into the tools your team already has open: a Slack channel, a shared inbox, a Telegram chat. Someone posts a question; your coworker picks it up, does the work, and replies on the same thread. To everyone else it looks like a colleague who answers quickly.
This is the inbound half — people reaching your coworker. For your coworker reaching out first, see Talking to people.

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When you’d use it

  • A support coworker that answers in #support-triage for the three people on the rota
  • An assistant reading a shared inbox, filtered to just the Requests label
  • A Telegram bot the field team messages from their phones
  • A coworker that replies in a DM so the conversation stays private
  • A channel where anyone on the team can ask for a report without learning a new tool

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Setting it up

Channels live on the coworker’s own Channels tab — not on Capabilities, where the outbound half sits.
1

Open the Channels tab

Open your coworker and choose Channels. Each channel you add gets a row with a name, an on/off switch, and the connection it runs on.
2

Pick the platform and connection

Slack, Gmail or Telegram, and which connected account it should listen on.
3

Say where to listen

This differs per platform and it’s the step people get wrong. See the table below.
4

Say who is allowed to talk to it

Add each person who may reach this coworker. This step is not optional — see the warning below.
5

Turn it on

The switch on the row starts the channel listening.

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Where to listen

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Who’s allowed to talk to it

Each person is one entry — a Slack member ID, an email address, or a Telegram user ID or @username — with an optional name so the list stays readable.
A Slack channel configured on the Channels tab, with a channel ID and three allowed senders

A Slack channel with three named people allowed. Anyone not on this list is never heard.

An empty list lets nobody through. This is deliberate. A message from someone who isn’t on the list never reaches your coworker at all — it isn’t read, answered, or seen.If you add a channel and nothing happens, this is almost always why.
That behaviour is the point. A coworker listening on a Slack channel is a coworker anyone in that channel could instruct, so the list is what makes putting one in a shared space safe. Your coworker only listens to people you’ve named.

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What it looks like

Replies come back on the same thread, so a channel conversation reads like any other. Nobody has to quote anything or repeat themselves. If several messages arrive in quick succession, your coworker handles them together rather than treating each as a fresh interruption — so someone typing three lines in a row gets one considered answer, not three half-answers.

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Good to know

Start with a DM or a quiet channel. Point a new coworker at a channel only you are in, check how it answers, then move it somewhere busier once you’re happy.
A channel uses the same connected accounts as everything else. The Gmail connection that lets your coworker send is the one it can listen on. See Connecting your apps.

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Common questions

Almost always the allowed-senders list. If it’s empty, nothing gets through. Check that the person messaging is on it, and that their ID is the right one for that platform.
Open their profile in Slack, then the overflow menu, then Copy member ID. It looks like U0123ABCDEF. Channel IDs start with C and come from the channel’s details.
Only if you leave the label filter empty, which is what that setting means. Set a label and it sees only messages carrying it.
Yes. Add a row per place — a Slack channel and a shared inbox, each with its own list of allowed people.
Yes, and you can follow it in CogniAgent like any other. The person messaging never sees that side of it.
The switch on the channel row. It stops listening immediately; nothing else about the coworker changes.

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Next steps

Talking to people

The other direction.

Connecting your apps

Where the connections come from.

Permission rules

Tighten what it may do once asked.

Managing your tasks

Follow what a channel started.