How I Answer Slack Messages 3× Faster With Echoo

I used to lose more time to Slack replies than I'd like to admit. Not the typing - the part before it. Re-reading the thread to catch what was actually being asked, drafting something, rereading it, deciding it sounded either too stiff or too short, rewriting it. A two-line reply could eat five minutes if the thread had any nuance to it.

I built a command for this called Slack Answer, on ⌥K. It's one of the ones I actually use every day, so it's worth explaining what it does and why it's different from just pasting a message into ChatGPT and asking for a reply.

It reads the thread, not just a line

The part that made it actually useful is screen context. Most rewrite tools only see the text you select. Slack Answer instead reads what's visible on screen - the messages above, who's saying what, the tone of the conversation - and writes a reply based on the whole exchange, not a single sentence pulled out of it. If someone's asking a follow-up to something said three messages up, the reply accounts for that instead of answering in a vacuum.

Press the shortcut, and a reply shows up ready to send or edit. I still read it before hitting enter - it's a draft, not an auto-pilot - but the drafting itself is the part that used to take the time.

Why it doesn't read like a bot

The thing I was worried about early on was that it would sound obviously AI-written - too polished, too even, the kind of message that makes people wonder if you actually typed it. The prompt behind the command is explicit about this: write like a real coworker replying in under ten seconds, not like an assistant. Short, plain, a little informal where the thread is informal. It's held up - nobody's ever asked me if a reply was AI-generated.

About that "3×"

I want to be honest about the number in the title: it's not a benchmark, it's what it feels like day to day. Some replies were always going to take ten seconds either way. The ones it actually saves time on are the threads with real context to track - and on those, going from "re-read, draft, second-guess, send" down to "read the draft, send" is a difference I notice every time.

If you want to try it

The command is Slack Answer in the marketplace (opens in new tab) if you want the exact prompt, or start from the Slack writing use case (opens in new tab) if you'd rather build your own version. If the text in a thread is sensitive, the same command can run through a local model instead of a cloud provider - worth setting up before you point it at anything you wouldn't paste into a public doc.

For the underlying feature, read how screen context gives AI the surrounding conversation (opens in new tab). You can also adapt the same idea into a repeatable Slack thread recap workflow (opens in new tab).