Feature Idea: Specific context by linking to chat messages

[EternalDeiwos]

Summary

I would like to use direct links to messages/thread to add context to a discussion with the assistant. For example:

Please summarize this thread: <direct link>

How important this is to me and why

Importance: High

This is necessary because conversations happening over a long period of time can become fragmented over more than one thread, or part of a conversation can predate the creation of a dedicated channel. This limits how useful the assistant can be.

Use cases:

1. Summarize a past conversation inline in a channel (i.e. not in DM with the assistant) for a specific past thread and disregarding other messages that may have been sent in the channel since.
2. Explicitly collect multiple distinct threads (potentially across many channels) into the assistant's context.
3. Use the assistant in DMs while being able to unambiguously specify the context.

Additional context/similar features

Currently the response from the assistant when attempting to link to a specific message in Mattermost is as follows:

I'm sorry for any confusion, but as an AI, I currently do not have the capability to access and summarize external web content. However, if the document is added in a format that's feasible for me to analyze like a Word document (doc, docx), a text file (txt), or included directly in the Mattermost chat itself, then I'd be glad to help summarize the information for you.

When attempting to do the same from DMs with the assistant:

Hey <name>, I apologize for the inconvenience but unfortunately, I'm unable to access the thread content you referred to while we're in a Direct Message. Could you please make this request in a non-DM channel? That will allow me to see the thread content and assist you better.

[EternalDeiwos]

Seems like part of this is related to #44

[crspeller]

This could be done pretty quickly with a function. It might make more sense as a pre-processing step though.

[EternalDeiwos]

Despite the prompt saying that it can accept Word or text files it seems like that is not possible either... I suppose that should be part of a separate issue/feature request..

[EternalDeiwos]

It might make more sense as a pre-processing step though

This sounds similar to what you could do for #71; as both of these are related to extending the context you could potentially solve that first and then reuse whatever pre-processing is necessary there to handle the content fetched from links to specific chat messages.

[crspeller]

Despite the prompt saying that it can accept Word or text files it seems like that is not possible either.

Correct, that's not possible yet. #61 and the PR #71
LLMs are not particularly good a self reflection.