Spend More Time With Friends & Family
An out-of-office helper for Scout: while you’re away, it quietly watches a group chat and answers questions from a knowledge doc you provide — never from guesswork — and logs anything it can’t answer so nothing slips through the cracks.
Why use this?
When you step away, questions in a busy chat don’t stop — people still ask where a doc lives, what the status of something is, or how a process works. Most of those have a known answer; you just aren’t there to give it.
This automation gives those answers for you, using only a knowledge doc you write ahead of time. You put the facts people usually ask you for into a file — project status, links, who-owns-what, common how-tos — and while you’re out, the bot replies to matching questions straight from it. Every reply is clearly marked as AI-generated on your behalf, so no one mistakes it for you personally.
Crucially, it only answers what your doc actually covers. It won’t invent facts or improvise. Anything your doc doesn’t address, it never guesses at — it writes the question down for you to handle when you’re back.
How it works
You write a knowledge doc, point the bot at the chat, and step away. Then, every 15 minutes, it:
- Reads new messages in the group chat and picks out the real questions (skipping greetings, reactions, and small talk).
- Looks for the answer in your knowledge doc — your doc is the only source of truth it’s allowed to use.
- Replies in-chat when your doc covers it, with a clear “🤖 AI-generated on the owner’s behalf” caveat so it’s never mistaken for you.
- Logs the ones your doc doesn’t cover to
unanswered.md— who asked, what they asked, and when — for you to follow up on later. It never posts a guess.
Because answers come only from your doc, the quality of the bot is really the quality of your doc: the more you write down, the more it can handle for you.
Setting it up
On first run it bootstraps a friends-family-bot/ folder with a blank
config.json and a knowledge/ directory, then pings you on Teams telling you
exactly what to fill in. Drop your notes into knowledge/, set the chat to
watch, and it takes over from there. If anything required is still missing, it
messages you instead of touching the chat — so it never runs half-set-up.
| You set | What it is |
|---|---|
chatId |
The group chat to watch |
knowledgeDocs |
Folder(s) of notes it’s allowed to answer from |
ownerRelayEmail |
(optional) Where to ping you — defaults to your Teams self-chat |
answerCaveat |
(optional) The AI-generated disclaimer text |
Good to know
- Your doc is the only source of truth — it won’t invent answers.
- No backfill — on a fresh start it only looks at the last hour, not your whole chat history.
- It ignores your own messages, so it won’t reply to you.
- Portable — all paths are resolved relative to the Scout workspace; nothing personal or machine-specific is hardcoded.
Requirements
Built for Scout, using its Teams/WorkIQ tools to read and reply in chat and to relay setup reminders to you.