Slack Huddles Upgrades Coming Soon  

New features include one-click video, multi-person screen sharing, auto-save to channel, and more

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Unified CommunicationsLatest News

Published: June 22, 2022

James Stephen

Technology Journalist

Slack Huddles is being updated to include one-click video, multi-person screen sharing, auto-save to channel, and more.  

The company has already shared a beta version with some of its customers, and it plans to make the upgrades generally available in autumn 2022.  

Slack Huddles is a lightweight audio-first means of communicating which has been built to emulate the everyday interactions and informal conversations that workers might share in an office.  

Rob Seaman, SVP for Slack at Salesforce, puts Slack into its broader market context:

“We are in a time where we are seeing the digital infrastructure take priority over the physical headquarters.  

“We are seeing 66% of workers in a flexible working situation at this time, meaning they are either remote workers or they are in a hybrid setup.  

“It is really the digital infrastructure that’s helped us cope through all this change, and it’s helped us stay productive and collaborative.”  

Slack Huddles has achieved a 95% customer satisfaction rating, and it is quickly becoming the fastest-growing adopted feature in the history of Slack.  

There are already millions of people using Slack Huddles every week, including companies such as Dell, Expedia Group, Wayfair, Intuit, and Kiva.  

New huddles features  

The main updates to Slack Huddles are one-click video, multi-person screen sharing and drawing, emojis, reactions and stickers, and auto-saving the message thread to a channel.  

The new huddles features will allow teams to brainstorm ideas and get feedback. The ideas can be shared in the thread for the team and managers to review. In the Slack Connect channel, you can share design ideas and screen-share presentations. It can also be used by remote workers who can add colleagues to a huddle from their phones with the option of sharing their live video too.  

Clips is another Slack feature to launch recently, allowing workers to share audio or video recordings in a direct message or a channel. Clips can be watched whenever the viewer is ready, and they come with searchable transcriptions. It was designed for workers that want flexibility and a simplified way of absorbing content. Slack users are currently viewing 1.2m minutes of clips every week.  

Slack Huddles are also being released for United States government agencies, fulfilling the necessary security and compliance requirements. The company believes the uptake by these various government bodies will dramatically increase the number of Slack users.  

Huddles is being showcased at Slack Frontiers 2022 today. According to Seaman, Slack Frontiers is a means for Slack to bring its customers together and talk about everything it has learned, provide a space for them to share information with each other, and speak about the changes it is making.  

Stewart Butterfield, CEO and Co-Founder of Slack, said at Slack Frontiers 2022:

“Huddles was intended to recreate the serendipity and spontaneity of office conversations. Some conversations only need to be 30 seconds or 60 seconds.

The call is not necessarily something that starts and stops. It’s a working session. It’s left open over the course of the day. That’s a little bit different to a meeting; it is more of a coworking session. 

“You would never just leave the Zoom call open when people stop talking for a few minutes but when you are able to do that, you can ask a question the same way you would at your desk. There is no waiting, scheduling or introducing another 30-minute slot. 

“That continuum between working sessions and meetings is one that is really interesting. There is an incredibly exciting road map here.”

New features were shared at Slack Frontiers in November last year, such as link sharing, message metadata and configurable notifications. The conference also introduced a set of developer tools to help build apps quickly and intuitively, which the VP of Product compared to Lego.  

Slack is a workplace messaging application which was acquired by Salesforce in 2020. It has customers in more than 150 customers, including 77 Fortune 100 companies.

Over one million developers are building apps on Slack and there are more than one million apps in active use each week.

At peak times, Slack delivers 300,000 messages per second, there are 15bn+ actions in Slack each week, and users actively use Slack 65 min a day while paid users average 90 minutes.

 

 

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