Slack rolls out AI-powered Highlights feature

Workplace collaboration platform Slack is rolling out a new feature that's designed to call attention to an individual user's most important messages.

The feature is called Highlights, and its the second major update to come out of Slack's Search Learning & Intelligence (SLI) group. Formed a year ago, SLI is a team of 12 people working to build an intelligent layer on top of Slack via search and machine-learning technology.

Slack -- which now has five million daily active users overall and 1.5 million users that are paying for the service -- says Highlights are the best prediction of the information that matters most to each user.

Highlights are based on individual interactions with people, channels, files, and apps in Slack, and they refine over time based on someone's use of the platform. Highlighted messages will appear both directly within the channels a user works in and collated at the top of All Unreads.

"Highlights become more personalized over time," wrote Slack in a blog post. "The teammates you work with and the channels you frequent teach Slack the ins and outs of what matters to you. And if a Highlight was particularly useful -- or perhaps missed the mark -- you can provide direct feedback via the thumbs up and down icons on each Highlight."

In a similar platform update last month, Slack released an AI-powered search feature that surfaces the channels most relevant to a given topic, the people in a network who have subject matter expertise related to that topic, and the channels where those people can be reached.