Slack announces support for voice, video chat coming 'very' soon
April Underwood, VP of Product for Slack, revealed the company's plans for the coming months at a press conference at San Francisco's Public Works on Tuesday.
Update: Slack released an invite only beta on Wednesday adding voice calling for only the desktop app. It works with multiple people and allows you to change the microphone while the call is going. You can also send emojis.
Most notably, Underwood revealed voice and video chat is coming to its cloud-based collaboration tool, to compete with competitors HipChat, Facebook, Skype, Google Hangouts and others.
The voice and video chat functionality will allow co-workers to communicate past chat messages. It could create more engagement within the app, instead of users launching things like Google Hangouts or Skype to complete a video conference.
Slack previously announced it was bringing screen sharing, audio, and video in January 2015 after its acquisition of Screenhero, but we haven't seen the feature.
TechCrunch reports Underwood, who became VP of Product in January, said: "We like to be really open and transparent because we want your feedback."
Underwood said the audio and video feature will launch "very soon."
Further, it was revealed Slack has 2.4 million daily active users, up from 2 million in December. Slack sees 320 million minutes of active usage per weekday.
A WYSIWYG text editor and more search operators are also coming. To serve basic calling, Slack already has limited Skype integration.
We have reached out to Slack for more details on the announcements.