You can now use Hipchat through your Amazon Echo

Slack may be the current darling of the workplace messaging space, but it’s by no means dominant. Lots of offices and teams depend on Atlassian’s HipChat, which today received an update that brings Amazon Alexa support, via Soft Serve’s VoiceMyBot.

Thanks to this tool, it’s now possible to start a conversation, just by speaking to your Amazon Echo device. Alexa can even respond on your behalf, notify you when new messages are posted, and show you summaries of chats.

Much like Slack, HipChat allows developers to build third-party extensions, which extend its functionality far beyond a messaging app. Alexa can also be taught commands that use these integrations.

This makes it possible for developers and systems administrators to, for example, check if a website is down, and if so deploy an earlier version of the site, just by speaking to their Echo. If a command isn’t available, a bespoke one can be made through Alexa’s Open API.

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You can use Alexa with HipChat from today. If you’re still wedded to Slack (and really, why wouldn’t you be? It’s awesome), you can add your own Alexa integration with IFTTT.