Slack is upgrading its Huddles feature with video chat, multi-user screen sharing, and a per-huddle chat thread. The company announced the updates at its Frontiers conference, which for Slack is both a chance to unveil new products and to share its thoughts about the future of work. With Huddles, Slackโs vision is simple: people need more, richer ways to chat, but they donโt need more meetings.
Huddles originally launched a year ago, and theyโve worked for Slack precisely because they donโt feel like meetings. The company always imagined the feature, which you can use to have a quick audio call inside Slack, as more akin to walking over to someoneโs desk rather than sending them a calendar invite. They were audio-only; you couldnโt schedule one; you could start one in any channel or direct message. It borrowed a lot from Discordโs audio chat features and has worked really well.
โWhatโs nice about Huddles is itโs not intrusive,โ says Tamar Yehoshua, Slackโs head of product. โItโs not like your phone is ringing and you have to pick it up. I can hang out in the huddle, listen to the nice background jazz music, and wait until youโre free.โ Huddles are often used as co-working tools, Yehoshua says, so teams can quickly get something done without the mental overhead of turning on cameras and having an official meeting. The company is proud that the average huddle is only 10 minutes long, a nice respite from a constant drumbeat of 30-minute Zoom meetings.
Image: Slack
Every huddle now comes with a chat, which is saved even after the huddle ends.
Now, though, huddles can be much more than that. Every huddle still starts as an audio chat โ โour goal was to reduce social pressure to turn on your video,โ Yehoshua says โ but you can click a button and turn on a tiny video chat in the sidebar of your Slack app. Hit another button, and the huddle gets its own window, at which point it feels an awful lot like a Zoom meeting. Which is what some people want! Slack has always tried to avoid being prescriptive about how people use the app, and Yehoshua says lots of users werenโt using huddles because they wanted video. โThere are plenty of other tools that are video-first,โ she says, โso why this in Slack? Itโs because itโs where you are already working.โ
It sounds like a bit of a departure, adding more complexity and fidelity to a thing that was deliberately low-stress. But video was always going to be part of Huddles. โWe probably will allow video sharing at some point,โ Slack CEO Stewart Butterfield told The Verge when Huddles first launched, though he acknowledged that it would be tricky to bring in video without making people worry about how they look or forcing them to stare at their computer for hours on end. โOn an audio call, you can be doing many other things and maintain the illusion that your counterpart is paying complete attention to everything youโre saying,โ Butterfield said then. Now, Slack seems to think that it can make video a tool to be used when necessary, not the default status for every quick chat.
When youโre in a video huddle, multiple people can share their screen simultaneously, which is a handy thing most chat apps donโt offer. And each huddle also gets a dedicated chat thread, which is then preserved in Slack after the huddle ends. Huddles themselves arenโt recorded, though: โIf you think of them as hallway conversations, and I want to catch you for five minutes, itโd be kind of weird if all that is searchable,โ Yehoshua says. She thinks of threads like the whiteboards you might draw on in meetings, an artifact of the chat that you might want preserved even if the chat itself doesnโt need to be.
Huddles is a smart feature for Slack to continue to push on because while it canโt compete with Zoom and Meet, it can start to find other ways for people to communicate in 2022 that donโt feel so much like business meetings. If Slack really wants to be a โvirtual headquarters,โ itโs going to have to figure out how to replace the rest of office life, too. Huddles is a good start.