Voice and video chat for Slack are in the works, boosting the potential of the collaboration tool in competing with the likes of Skype and Google Hangouts.
The company's VP of Product April Underwood announced the upcoming features during a customer conference held at Public Works in San Francisco, revealing what Slack has in store for users in 2016.
With more than 2.3 million daily active users, these updates will definitely increase the productivity of users everywhere.
While Slack can already provide voice call function thanks to the recent Skype integration, it does have a couple of limitations.
"If I'm DMing someone in Slack and we want to switch to have a quick voice conversation, it addresses that problem," Underwood tells TechCrunch.
She continues to say that voice chat on the desktop will roll out first, followed by its implementation to other devices and apps. The company will get started on launching video support when every kink on the voice chat has been taken care of.
What these features entail is how users won't have to rely on other apps such as Skype and Google Hangouts to start a video conference. In other words, they'll be able to do so within the app instead. On top of that, they'll finally be capable of going beyond the chat messaging medium, which is less efficient compared to voice communication at the very least.
Regarding the promised audio, video and screen-sharing functionality, Slack has yet to deliver. This stems from the company's acquisition of Screenhero back in January 2015.
Moving forward, Underwood unveiled the entire 2016 product roadmap to the audience at the event for transparency's sake.
"We like to be really open and transparent because we want your feedback," she said.
At first glance, voice and video chatting seems like it'll create quite the ruckus in the office, but nevertheless, the features will mold Slack into a complete productivity and collaboration tool that doesn't depend on other software.
