What you need to know
- Slack will gain Instagram-like stories and push-to-talk audio features before the end of the year.
- Slack hopes that the new features will help "cut down on constant video calls."
- Slack's stories feature will allow remote workers to share status updates and set the daily agenda for their teams.
Slack will soon add two new features that have been designed to help remote workers in the new work-from-home era. According to The Verge, the new Instagram-like stories and push-to-talk audio features will be available to Slack users sometime before the end of the year.
Slack's stories feature will enable remote workers to share status updates or set the daily agenda for their team. The company is hoping that the feature will help cut down on the need for video calls. It is expected to appear alongside channels in Slack, making it easy for everyone to check in with each other. In an interview with The Verge, Slack CEO Stewart Butterfield said stories will provide "a little bit more of a human way of giving updates."
The other new feature will work just like push-to-talk, enabling users to have instant audio calls with co-workers within a channel. Explaining the upcoming feature, Butterfield said:
The idea is that the call isn't something that starts and stops, it's something you enter and leave and the call is always there permanently associated with the channel. It's meant for generally small teams that are working very close with each other on a specific problem.
Even though Slack joined hands with Amazon earlier this year to use the retail giant's Chime platform for voice and video calling, it believes there is "room for more than just video conferencing as a means of people communicating using voice and video."
