Ask Bob something in the HeyBob app and the reply feels like it comes back quicker than the same question in Slack. Our founder noticed it first and guessed the app was about twice as fast. So we timed it, and the honest answer is more interesting than “twice as fast.”
Your answer arrives at about the same time in both places. What changes is the wait. In the app, Bob shows he has your message the instant you press enter, and on longer jobs you watch him work. In Slack you get a small emoji, then quiet until the answer lands. A wait you can see feels shorter than a wait you can't.
What we measured
Bob shows he has your message
Answer on screen
Time spent delivering, not working
Medians across ten questions in each place. Each pair of bars is drawn to its own scale.
| HeyBob app | Slack | |
|---|---|---|
| Bob shows he has it | 0.04s (“Bob is on it”) | 1.7s (the eyes emoji) |
| Answer on screen, median | 15.5s | 16.8s |
| Answer on screen, fastest to slowest | 10.6s to 52.8s | 11.4s to 24.0s |
| Time spent delivering, median | 1.8s | 1.8s |
| Showed Bob's steps while he worked | 4 of 10 questions | 0 of 10 questions |
Most of every wait is Bob doing the work: reading the question, thinking, looking things up. That part is the same job wherever you ask. The delivery part, getting your message to Bob and his answer back to you, took a median of 1.8 seconds in both places. The spread in answer times comes from the questions and the AI model, not from the app or Slack.
So why does the app feel faster?
Two things, and both happen while you wait.
- You know right away that Bob has it. The app shows “Bob is on it” the moment you press enter. In Slack, the first sign is an eyes emoji on your message, which took a median of 1.7 seconds to appear. Less than two seconds sounds small, but it is the stretch where you wonder whether anything happened.
- You can watch the work. When a question needed Bob to look something up, the app showed his working card about 11 seconds in, with each step as he took it. In our Slack runs, nothing appeared between the emoji and the answer.
The reason is where Bob lives. In Slack, Slack sits in the middle: your message goes to Slack, Slack passes it to Bob, and Bob's replies have to go back through Slack, which decides how a bot's messages look and how often they can change. The app talks to Bob directly, so it can show you what he is doing as he does it.
When to use which
- Use Slack where your team already talks. Ask Bob in a channel or thread and everyone sees the answer in context. He works the same there, and you get your answer in about the same time.
- Use the app for focused work. When you are going back and forth with Bob on one thing, the app keeps you in the loop the whole time instead of leaving you staring at a quiet thread.
It is the same Bob in both places, with the same memory, connections, and receipts. Pick the one that fits the moment.
How we tested
On October 1, 2026 we sent the same ten short questions to Bob in Slack and in the HeyBob app on our test environment: four one-line facts, three small reasoning questions, and three that needed a web lookup. We alternated which place went first for each question. For each one we recorded when it was sent, when the first sign of Bob appeared, and when the answer appeared, and we took Bob's own working time from his run records. Subtracting his working time from the total gives the delivery time. Our two test workspaces were set to different AI models, which is why individual answer times swing, so the delivery time is the fair comparison. Slack times come from Slack's own message timestamps, so they leave out the fraction of a second Slack takes to draw the message on your screen.