Slack added video to Huddles so you don’t have to spend your life in Zoom meetings

Video chat, multi- user screen sharing, and a per-huddle chat thread are some of the new features that will be added to the Huddles feature. The updates were announced at the conference, which was a chance for the company to show off new products and discuss the future of work. People need more ways to chat, but they don't need more meetings.

They work for Slack because they don't feel like meetings. The company imagined that the feature, which you can use to have a quick audio call inside Slack, would be more akin to walking over to someone's desk. They were audio only and you couldn't schedule one. It uses a lot of the audio chat features of Discord.

"What's nice about Huddles is it's not intrusive." It's not like you have to pick it up. I can hang out in the huddle and listen to jazz music while you wait. Teams can quickly get something done without the mental overhead of turning on cameras and having an official meeting if they use huddles. The company is proud of the fact that the average huddle is only 10 minutes long.

Image: Slack

huddles can be more than that The goal was to reduce social pressure to turn on your video, but you can click a button and turn on a tiny video chat in the sidebar of your slack app When you hit another button, the huddle gets its own window, which feels very much like a zoom meeting. Some people want something. According to Yehoshua, a lot of users weren't using huddles because they wanted video She says that there are plenty of other tools that are video first. It's because you're already at work.

Adding more complexity and fidelity to a thing that was low stress sounds like a departure. Video was going to be part of the culture. It would be difficult to bring in video without making people worry about how they look or forcing them to stare at their computer for hours. Butterfield said that on an audio call, you can do many other things and keep the illusion that your counterpart is paying attention. The default status for every quick chat may be changed to make video a tool to be used when needed.

Most chat apps don't offer the ability for multiple people to share their screen at the same time. Each huddle has a dedicated chat thread, which is preserved after the huddle is over. "If you think of them as hallway conversations, and I want to catch you for five minutes, it'd be weird if all that is searchable." Even if the chat itself doesn't need to be preserved, she thinks of threads like the whiteboards you might draw on in meetings, an artifact of the chat that you might want to keep.

While it can't compete with Zoom and Meet, it can start to find other ways for people to communicate that don't feel like a business meeting. It will have to figure out how to replace the rest of office life in order to be a virtual headquarters. It's a good beginning.