Slack launches Clips along with a couple of improvements

Slack launches Clips along with a couple of improvements
Slack launches Clips along with a couple of improvements

According to the latest news, Slack is launching its new clips feature today which will allow co-workers to record video messages existing in Slack channels. Clips support audio from a microphone, alongside video and screen recordings. They are specially designed to help teams communicate across various time zones and cut down on the amount of meetings.

Apart from clips, Slack is also expanding Slack Connect to allow a paid organization to partner with companies on free plans. Slack is announcing GovSlack. It will run in a government certified cloud environment after its launch next year. While Slack can already be used by the US government. It complies with federal government requirements like FedRAMP High and DoD IL4 certifications.

Note that clips can be shared in channels or through DMs on Slack. They will include live captions as well as a searchable transcript within the Slack interface. Since they are just like sharing an image or a text message in Slack, co-workers will be able to reply with text, audio, video, or emoji. The company has been working on this feature for more than a year. Initially, these features sounded more like Instagram Stories that disappear after a day.

In an interview, Tamar Yehoshua, chief product officer at Slack said “We were inspired by how people are using video in consumer apps. We actually prototyped a lot of different versions of this internally, and now we’ve settled on this as a means of communicating into your work repository.”

With clips, it seems, Slack is attempting to address the needs of businesses adjusting to working from home. Huddles, a Discord-like audio calls feature, launched earlier this year is Slack’s “fastest adopted feature” according to Yehoshua.

Slack is also improving Slack Connect, which lets partner organizations work together in Slack and communicate. Slack is now extending this to companies that aren’t on paid Slack plans yet. Slack Enterprise Grid customers can invite anyone to use Slack and communicate with them instantly this fall.

Back in July, SalesForce acquired Slack with a $27.7 billion deal. It seems SalesForce sees Slack as its digital hub, therefore, it is integrating more of its services into Slack. Rob Seaman, senior vice president of Slack at SalesForce said “SalesForce has about 10 million developers in our ecosystem, and so what we’ve focused on with our platform work is connecting our platform to Slack for the SalesForce developer ecosystem. We consider Slack as the new engagement layer for SalesForce. We think the greater majority of users will be staying in Slack to do their work.”

Note that the basic concept of making Slack a work hub is very similar to what Microsoft has been doing with Teams. SalesForce will help Slack respond to Teams while keeping Slack’s APIs open to others developers so that they can integrate new apps and services.

Maria Janulis
Maria is a Florida-based columnist, working in the Journalism industry for the last five and a half years. She spends most of her time interacting with the like-minded group of people on social media.