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Capturing from your phone

You find a paper on your phone. ALMa isn't installed there, and by the time you're back at your desk you've forgotten it.

The Inbox fixes that: send the link to a Slack channel, and the paper is waiting in ALMa — already in your corpus, already enriched, needing only a decision.

What this is not

Capturing is not saving. A captured paper sits in the Inbox until you triage it, and it does not influence your recommendations while it waits. A link you flick at 8am and discard at noon leaves no trace.

Before you start

You need the ALMa Slack app installed in your workspace, with the capture scopes, and its token saved in ALMa. That is one page, done once:

→ Connecting Slack

Make sure you granted the capture scopes there — channels:read, groups:read, groups:history, reactions:write (plus channels:history if your channel is public). If you set Slack up earlier for alerts only, add those scopes now and Reinstall to Workspace; a scope does nothing until you reinstall.

Two rules that cause most failures, repeated here because they bite hardest in this flow:

  1. Scopes take effect only after (re)installing the app.
  2. A bot reads only channels it has been added to — installing it in the workspace grants nothing on its own.

Setting up capture

Step 1 — Create the capture channel and add the bot to that channel

Now in the Slack app itself (not the developer site):

  1. Click + beside Channels in the sidebar → Create a channel.
  2. Name: alma-inbox. Visibility: Private. → Create.

  3. Open #alma-inbox and send this message in the channel:

    /invite @ALMa

    Use your bot's actual name if you named the app something else — Slack autocompletes it as you type. If nothing autocompletes, the app is not installed — see Connecting Slack step 3.

  4. Slack confirms: "@ALMa was added to #alma-inbox".

That invite is the membership that matters. The bot can now read #alma-inbox — and still nothing else: not your other channels, not your DMs.

Use a channel for nothing else

Every message here is treated as a capture attempt. Don't reuse a channel you chat in.

Step 2 — Tell ALMa which channel to read

Settings → Plugins → Slack → Capture papers from → type alma-inbox (bare name, no #) → Save plugin settings.

Empty field = capture off.

Why this is separate from 'Default Slack Channel'

Default Slack Channel is where ALMa posts alerts to. Capture channel is what ALMa reads from. They can be the same channel — the poller skips any message carrying a bot_id, so ALMa never re-reads its own alerts. A dedicated capture channel is still better: digests are long and frequent, and they bury the links you send.

Step 3 — Prove it works

  1. In Slack, post a paper link into #alma-inbox:

    https://doi.org/10.1038/s41586-019-1666-5

  2. In ALMa: Settings → Plugins → Slack → Check capture now — runs the check immediately instead of waiting up to 5 minutes.

  3. Expect the toast "Captured 1 paper". (With nothing new to capture you get "Connected to #alma-inbox" instead — that is also a success, and it confirms the token, scopes, channel and bot membership are all correct.)
  4. In Slack, your message now shows a 📥 reaction.
  5. Open Home — the paper is in the Inbox section.

If something else happened:

What you saw Cause Fix
"No capture channel is configured" Step 2 didn't save Re-enter the name and Save
Error mentioning not_in_channel Bot isn't in the channel Redo step 1.3
Error mentioning missing_scope A scope is absent, or the app wasn't reinstalled after you added one Recheck the scopes in Connecting Slack, then Reinstall to Workspace
Error mentioning invalid_auth Token wrong or regenerated Re-copy it from Connecting Slack step 4
"Connected to #alma-inbox" Success — the connection works, there was just nothing new to capture Nothing to fix; post a link and re-check
❓ instead of 📥 The link held no identifiable paper Read ALMa's thread reply

From then on

Just post links. ALMa checks every 5 minutes on its own — tune with INBOX_SWEEP_INTERVAL_MINUTES (see Configuration); 0 turns the automatic check off and leaves only the manual button.

Using it

Post a link. That's the whole workflow.

ALMa checks every five minutes and reacts on your message so you know what happened without opening the app:

Reaction Meaning
📥 Captured — it's in your Inbox
📚 You already have this in your Library
❓ Couldn't identify a paper — ALMa replies in-thread with why
⚠️ Something failed upstream; it'll retry

A successful capture is otherwise silent. ALMa only speaks up when something needs you.

What it recognises

  • DOIs in any form — bare, doi:10.…, https://doi.org/…
  • arXiv links and ids (arxiv.org/abs/…, arXiv:2401.12345)
  • bioRxiv links
  • OpenAlex work ids
  • A plain publisher URL, as a last resort

Type whatever you like around the link — prose is ignored. A message with no usable identifier is kept, not silently dropped, and Home tells you about it.

Triaging

Captured papers appear in the Inbox section on Home, newest first. The section disappears entirely when it's empty — it notifies, it doesn't nag.

Each card carries the normal actions:

Action What it does
Save / Like / Love Moves it into your Library (3★ / 4★ / 5★)
Dislike Records a negative preference
Not now (the ✕) Removes it from the Inbox, keeps it in your corpus, and records no opinion at all

That last one matters. "Not now" is not a judgement — it means "I looked, and there's nothing to do here." It teaches ALMa nothing. If you want ALMa to learn that a paper is wrong for you, use Dislike.

The Inbox is a buffer, not a shelf. Papers aren't meant to accumulate there.

While a paper waits

It's a full member of your corpus from the moment it arrives:

  • its abstract and citation data are filled in automatically;
  • it gets a semantic embedding and a position on your maps;
  • if the same paper later arrives through your Feed, ALMa recognises it rather than showing it twice.

The one thing it does not do is affect Discovery. Your recommendations are built only from your Library, so an untriaged capture can't skew them.

Troubleshooting

Nothing happens when I post. Check the bot is actually in the channel (/invite @ALMa), that the channel name in Settings matches, and that you reinstalled the Slack app after adding scopes. Then press Check capture channel now — it reports what it found.

ALMa reacted ❓. It couldn't find a paper in the message. The in-thread reply says why. News articles, blog posts and Google Docs links have no DOI and won't resolve.

I posted the same link twice. Only one paper is created. Every message is keyed by its Slack timestamp, so re-posting — or ALMa re-checking — can't duplicate it.

Can I use email / Telegram instead? Not yet, but the capture layer is channel-agnostic by design: a new channel is a small adapter, not a new pipeline. See Building an integration.

Why not a self-DM? A Slack bot can't read the DM you have with yourself — only a user token can, and that would let ALMa read your entire Slack. A private channel keeps the permissions narrow.