Slack Slack releases four new features, one-click voice conference, "Harder conference", etc.

　On June 30, 2021, Slack Technologies released a new feature, "Slack Huddles (Slack Huddles)", which allows team members to easily start voice meetings on Slack. This is a feature that enables easy conversations online, just like it did in corners and corridors of the office.

　In addition, new functions such as "simple video / contribution function of animation / sound message", "reservation sending function of information" and "staff list (catalog) function on Slack" have been published.

Slack Huddles (Slack Huddles), a new feature of team members' voice conference, can be started easily with one click.

Slack Technologies co-founder and CEO Stewart Butterfield (Stewart Butterfield) and senior product manager Julie Haines (Julie Haynes)

Slack Harder meeting on "the feeling of suddenly stopping at a colleague's desk to talk"

　Slack Harder conferencing is a new feature that makes it easy to have voice conferences and voice conversations between team members. You can start the conversation from the channel or DM with one click. If you are a member of the same channel, anyone can participate in the conversation. Available to Slack payment plan users.

　The Harder meeting (Huddle Meeting) originally originated from the meeting style of the brief Strategy meeting (Huddle) held in American football matches. This is not to decide the schedule in advance and the attendees to prepare the formal meeting in the conference room, but the impression of a "slight negotiation" of about 10 to 30 minutes in the shared space of the office.

　The Slack Harder meeting is a function that enables this kind of slight negotiation online. The camera image of the member is not displayed by voice only, but the screen can be shared. For the purpose of communication between text messages and Web meetings.

Click the button at the bottom of the Slack sidebar to start the Harder meeting. The camera image will not play, but the screen can be shared

　"this is not the level of a formal appointment for a meeting, and it is more appropriate to discuss over-complex topics conveyed in text," explains Julie Haynes, senior product manager at Slack. He said he wanted to reproduce the image of "suddenly stopping on a colleague's desk in the office and talking like him" in Slack.

　The Slack Harder conference has live subtitles (automatic subtitles) and takes into account the accessibility of the deaf-mute. Here, we use the technology that AWS "Amazon Chime" announced as a partnership last year. At present, there are only English equivalents, but because Amazon Chime is also promoting other language equivalents, according to its progress, multilingual equivalents will also take place.

　A pilot version of this feature has been partially available to customers. For example, in Dell Technologies, this feature is used to improve response in situations such as incident management and troubleshooting. In addition, in Japan, Kukpard introduced a pilot project to be used as a meeting place for uncertain participants and purposes, and in some cases to hold short meetings instead of meetings.

Add your message to the video by adding Slack contribution and simple video recording function.

　The "simple video / contribution function for video / voice messages", introduced as a new feature in the experiment at the annual event "Slack Frontiers2020" last October, has also been officially released. Features for paid plan users will be available in turn in the coming months.

You can start the video recording function with one click from the usual information input field, and the video information animation can be submitted immediately.

　Click the camera button added in the message input field to start this function. You can record messages and post videos directly to Slack while using your own camera image and screen sharing features. Even if no one is online, "asynchronous (non-real-time)" communication can be achieved by recording / recording messages and ideas and posting information. Like ordinary text messages, posted videos / sounds can also be commented by members in posts.

　As an example of active use, Haines enumerates "animations that share oral points while the screen shows the design he has made." In addition, the live subtitle function is also prepared here, and the subtitle can also be searched for keywords, starting from a specific scene in the animation.

　Mr. Haines' team also said they took advantage of this feature in the product development cycle to improve the efficiency of collaboration between development and design teams that promote distributed work remotely.

You can specify the function of when the message is released and the function of organizing the directory

　The "Schedule Send" function, such as its name, is a function that specifies when a message is sent. When you click the arrow added to the send message button, you can set when to send the message. This feature is available to all users, including free programs.

　Haines explained that while Slack is originally a tool for asynchronous (non-real-time) communication, "by being able to set the date and time when a message is sent, you can control the timing of communication."

The "Schedule Send" function that can specify the delivery timing of the message

　Finally, the new feature is "Slack Atlas". It is reported that this is the employee roster (organizational directory) function on Slack, which is realized by integrating the employee roster application "Rimeto" acquired in 2020.

　By working with personnel / HR SaaS (such as "Workday"), you can immediately learn about the relationship of the organization to which you belong on Slack, thus getting detailed information from the user profile of Slack.

　Slack Atlas is an enterprise-oriented extension that, with some Enterprise Grid users in the United States and Canada, began to be available to optional users in the Business Plus Program.

On Slack, you can see "Slack Atlas" such as detailed introduction of members and organization chart to which they belong.

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　The news event held to tie in with the launch introduced the latest findings of the think-tank Future Forum on the future working methods (for the United States, Britain, France, Germany, Holland and Japan). It is reported that "people who want to work full-time" account for 17%, "people who want to continue to work remotely full-time" account for 20%, and "people who want to be flexible in both ways of working" account for 63%.

　Regarding the survey results, Stuart Butterfield, co-founder and CEO of Slack Technologies, said that as a "way of the future office", compared with going to work several times a week, "companies make full use of digital tools and technologies." He commented that it is important to attach importance to software that supports the same productivity and collaboration as the physical office.

　In addition, Japan has become the world's second-largest market, with sales up 76 per cent in fiscal 2021 compared with the previous fiscal year, according to Slack. It is reported that the number of paying customers has also increased by 76% over the previous year.