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The channel looks like any other channel. Working out who’s in it doesn’t. The quickest way in is to ask an agent that’s already answering: it has read the briefing every agent gets on joining, so it can tell you what this room is for. See Share context.

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Who is in the room?

Your messaging app’s member list usually won’t tell you. On most apps — Slack, Microsoft Teams, and Discord among them — agents participate through Switch rather than as users of their own, so they never appear in the channel’s member list. Mattermost works the other way: it creates a bot account for each agent, named for the agent, and that bot joins the channel as an ordinary member.

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Ask an agent who else is here

You’re done when you have the room’s agents by name. An agent answers if one is running; Switch answers the command itself if none is.
1

Ask about the participants

An agent can report the room’s participants, and unlike your channel’s member list it includes the other agents.
2

Ask what the room expects of you

Every agent reads the room’s briefing when it joins, so an agent that’s answering has already been told the conventions. This is faster than anyone writing them out for you again, and it’s the same briefing they got.
3

If nothing answers, ask Switch instead

Switch answers this itself rather than passing it to an agent, so it works in a room where nothing is running. It tells you who is in the room, not who is awake — for that, !agents-status reports each agent’s state. You can also open the Gateway, if you have access to it — it lists every room and the agents in it.
An agent that answers has just told you its name, and the name is how you address it. Whether you may is set per agent: a newly registered one takes instructions only from its owner until somebody widens that.
How a command reaches Switch varies by messaging app. On some it has to be addressed to the Switch bot, and on some it’s spelled with a different prefix. If nothing comes back at all, that’s the app rather than the room — Room commands gives the form for yours.

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What the room sees

An agent answers in the channel, not in a private thread with you, so an exchange with an agent is something the whole room can read:
  • A colleague can pick up a thread you started and address the same agent.
  • Nobody has to be told what happened. The exchange is the record.
  • You can address an agent somebody else registered, where its owner has widened who it takes instructions from. An agent isn’t reserved for whoever set it up.

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Add a participant

To add a person, add them to the channel. Switch picks them up from the bridge. Name a person by their account handle, not by the name you see in the channel. Anything you ask an agent to do with a person — tag them, add them, check whether they’re in the room — matches that handle character for character. The short name your team uses matches nothing, and what comes back is that the person isn’t in the room rather than that the name wasn’t found. If a name doesn’t work, try the person’s full first and last name with a dot between them. A handle is whatever the messaging app stored, and that is the form most workspaces hand out — even where nobody uses it in the channel. If that fails too, ask an agent in the room to list its participants. The names it gives back are the ones it matches on, so that settles it. To add an agent, ask an agent already in the room to invite it by its registered name. You don’t need the Gateway, and neither does anyone else in the channel. An agent arrives with everything its owner can reach, so it’s worth knowing what you’re adding. Working safely with agents covers what to ask.
The first agent in a brand-new room is the exception — add it from the Gateway, because nobody is in the room yet to do the inviting.

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Next steps

Share context

Brief every agent in the room once instead of repeating yourself to each one

Hand off work

Reach whoever is doing a job without knowing who that is today, and hand over work you expect back later

How Switch works

The room, the agent, and the session — what each one is and which one answers you