Slack has finally released its generative ai toolset to the world. The vast majority of these features aim to simplify your daily life when using the work-focused chat platform.
First, the ai will automatically generate channel summaries to give you the highlights of everything you missed while away from your keyboard or smartphone. Slack says the algorithm that generates these summaries is smart enough to separate the content of the different topics discussed. In other words, if his coworkers launched into a debate about coffee beans and also talked about third-quarter earnings or whatever, he should get a paragraph about both.
There is a similar tool available for threads, which are basically individual or group conversations that don't take up an entire channel. This allows users to “catch up on any thread with a single click.” Now you can safely ignore that colleague who messages you eight times in a row when a short paragraph would absolutely suffice.
Another cool feature here is conversational search. This allows you to ask a question using natural language instead of using Slack's pre-existing search bar to slowly crawl through past chats. The algorithm does the crawling for you and provides you with a “clear, concise response based on relevant conversation data.”
It remains to be seen how much time these tools will save the average user during the workday, but Slack says it remains committed to artificial intelligence. To that end, the company is preparing more native ai features, including the ability to generate personalized summaries of channels that users don't check daily but want to keep an eye on. Additionally, Slack says it will soon integrate some of its most used third-party apps into the ai ecosystem.
