Slack to HeyGen News Anchor Videos with OpenAI | n8n Workflow

Turn Slack news ideas into HeyGen “news anchor” avatar videos—automatically

This n8n workflow listens for prompts in Slack, uses OpenAI to draft and revise a short broadcast script in-thread, then triggers HeyGen to generate a talking-avatar video and posts the finished video link right back to Slack. No editing tools required.

What this workflow does

• Starts on Slack messages: Triggers on new messages in your configured Slack channel(s) or DMs, extracting the sender, channel ID, and message text.
• Prevents accidental loops: Ignores bot messages, edited events, and empty messages.
• Manages a review session per channel: Checks an n8n Data Table for any pending session awaiting confirmation.
• Drafts a script with OpenAI (no pending session): Sends the user’s news bullets to OpenAI to generate a 30-second broadcast script (about 75–85 words), saves it as a draft in the Data Table, and posts it to Slack for review.
• Revises in the thread (pending session exists): Treats the next message as confirmation or feedback; when feedback is provided, uses OpenAI to revise the draft and posts the updated script back to Slack.
• Generates the HeyGen video (on confirmation): Calls the HeyGen API to start avatar generation, stores the HeyGen job ID, and polls every 15 seconds until the video completes (or fails/times out).
• Delivers the result: Posts the HeyGen video URL to Slack on success and marks the session completed; otherwise sends a failure notice and marks the session failed.

Use cases

• Newsrooms and SaaS teams drafting daily updates: share bullet points in Slack, get a ready-to-publish anchor-style video.
• Marketing operators iterating scripts quickly with in-thread feedback before generating the avatar video via HeyGen.
• Internal comms: turn announcements into consistent short broadcasts without manual editing.

Technical details

• Integrations: Slack (Event Subscriptions), OpenAI, HeyGen API
• n8n nodes / building blocks: if, code, no op, wait, Slack, Data Table
• Setup: Create a Slack app with Event Subscriptions for message events (channels and/or DMs) and configure n8n Slack credentials using the Signing Secret and Bot Token.