When Clubhouse first appeared, audio-first experiences suddenly became important and existing messaging services started implementing their own versions. The latest to do so is Slack, which has just launched "a lightweight audio-first way to start live conversations."
The feature is called Slack huddles, and the focus is on encouraging casual conversations like colleagues used to have when they were all in the same office. Now with many people working remotely, and remote-work seeming to be the new normal going forward, the ability to initiate a quick chat is going to remain a challenge.
A huddle can be started in either a Slack channel or via a DM. It's not limited to people working within an organization, either. Of course, like many new features, paying Slack customers get the feature first and it should already be available to use.
Slack also took the opportunity today to tease a new feature for creating and sharing video, voice, and screen recordings as a way of replacing the daily meeting. The idea is to allow everyone to record what they want to share in the meeting ahead of time, be that a set of slides, a voice recording, or video clip, and then share it. Sharing can also be scheduled to go live at a specific time.
Everyone else on the team can then view these recordings at their leisure, as a stream of content from different people, and with the ability to speed up or slowdown playback. The meeting still happens, it's just not live anymore. Slack also offers live captioning for all recorded content and for huddles, too. Unlike huddles, though, the new recording feature won't be available to paid users for a few months yet.