What's New in Asante Bot: Summer 2026

We rebuilt this website in June and have been shipping steadily since — in the Slack app and around it. Here is the whole summer in one place.

Your other tools can now say thank you

The change we are most pleased with. Turn on Allow Recognition Points From Bots in General Settings, and any app already posting in your channels can recognize teammates on its own — your HRIS, your deploy bot, a Zapier workflow.

There is no API to build against. The app posts a message containing your recognition emoji and an @mention, exactly the way a person would, and Asante Bot treats it the same way — the same emoji-reaction mechanic your team already uses.

A few guardrails we put in deliberately:

• Bots have no daily limit, but a single bot message can recognize at most 20 people, so a misconfigured integration cannot flood your workspace.
• Apps that give recognition points never show up on your leaderboard, in your team member list, or on your bill.

The obvious use is automating the thank-you everyone means to send and nobody remembers: closed a support ticket, shipped a release, finished onboarding.

React to a celebration, add your own point

Reacting to a birthday or work anniversary post with your recognition emoji now sends a point to the person being celebrated. The same works on messages from other apps — react to pile on with a point of your own.

A small change that closed an odd gap: the celebration post was the one message in the channel where the usual gesture did nothing.

Celebrations go out on your clock

Birthday and work anniversary posts no longer have to go out at 10:00 AM. In Celebration Central you can set the send time in half-hour steps and pick any timezone, independent of your workspace default — useful when your team's morning does not match your Slack settings.

One click resets everything to the default schedule. Changes apply the moment you save, with no reinstall and no support ticket. The birthday and work anniversary bot page covers how it all fits together, and the help center has the step-by-step for send times.

Birthday messages that write themselves

Celebration posts can carry a personal message and an attached GIF — and if you are stuck for words, Asante will draft a suggestion tailored to the occasion, whether that is a birthday, a hire date, or a work anniversary. Anniversary tenure requirements are also configurable per workspace now.

If you would rather not maintain dates by hand, HRIS sync pulls them from BambooHR, Rippling, Deel and others.

Private recognition got faster and more reliable

The recipient picker for private recognition points used to load every active teammate into one long dropdown, which was painful in a large workspace. It is a searchable type-ahead list now.

Two bugs worth naming are also fixed: private points could occasionally post publicly, and did not always appear in a recipient's contribution history.

A clearer line between free and paid

The core birthday and work anniversary bot stays free forever — default templates, default send time, every plan. Custom celebration messages and GIFs, custom send times, and HRIS sync belong to the paid plan, and all of them are included in the 30-day free trial.

Nothing is deleted if your trial ends. Custom messages, HRIS connections, and schedules are kept and resume when you upgrade. The pricing page and the settings screens now show exactly which celebration features sit on which plan.

The rest of the app, briefly

Everything above sits on top of the parts that have not changed much because they are working: the rewards catalogue your team redeems points against, leaderboards that make giving visible, reporting and analytics for who is actually being recognized, AI insights mapping recognition to your company values, user roles so admin work can be shared, and Feedback Day — the weekly nudge that turns recognition into a ritual rather than a good intention. New to all of it? How it works is the two-minute version, and the turnover calculator estimates what attrition is costing you today.

Somewhere to look things up

The help center now covers setup, rewards, celebrations, user roles, and billing — written for the person doing the rollout, not for a search engine.

The glossary is 70 plain-English definitions of recognition, culture, and people-ops terms — including the difference between recognition frequency and recognition coverage rate, which is the distinction that usually settles an argument with a skeptical finance lead. Peer-to-peer recognition, recognition rituals, and recognition fatigue are the three most people arrive looking for.

Honest comparisons, including the ones that don't flatter us

We also published comparison pages for 11 recognition tools, including HeyTaco, Bonusly, and Matter.

Each one states the competitor's strengths before ours, and describes their pricing at the level they publish it rather than guessing. Some end with a straight recommendation to use the other tool: Donut solves a different problem, and plenty of teams should run both. Nectar and Assembly are the closest fits if you want a heavier rewards catalogue or a broader engagement suite.

Every statistic we quote across the site is defined on our methodology page, including what we deliberately do not count. If a number looks too good, that page will tell you how it was measured.

Everything in one place

If you skipped to the bottom, this is the summer in links.

Shipped in the app — bot and reaction recognition, celebration send times and timezones, AI-written celebration messages, HRIS sync, faster private recognition, and a clearer free vs. paid split.

New on the site — the help center, the glossary, comparison pages for 11 tools, and the methodology page behind every number we quote.

What's next

The changelog is the running record, updated as things ship — it is the fastest way to see what changed without waiting for a post like this one.

If there is something your team keeps working around, we would genuinely like to hear it. Tell us, and it may well show up in the next roundup.