Slack has finally made its artificial intelligence (AI)-powered assistant, Slack AI, available to users globally. On Thursday, the company announced the general availability of Slack AI to all users and organisations with a paid subscription to the platform with an add-on purchase. This came after the platform unveiled its AI features earlier in February. The AI assistant offers several features such as recaps, search, and conversation summaries. The business-focused communications app has also shared the features it plans to add in the future.
The company made the announcement via a blog post, and said, “In February, we released Slack AI and a set of initial features designed to help you work smarter and faster. Today we're announcing that Slack AI is now available in English, Spanish and Japanese for customers on all paid Slack subscriptions to purchase.” However, those who want to use the AI's features will have to pay an add-on charge for it.
Slack AI features
Slack AI comes with several AI-powered features which the company says are designed to save users' time and improve their productivity. One of the features is called search where users can ask the AI a question by typing it in the search bar and it will run through the organisation's public communication and the user's personal conversations to find the answer. These answers will come with direct citations for the user to find the source and read additional information.
Channel recaps is another interesting feature. Users can generate highlights for any channel they are a part of with a click and get a quick rundown of everything that was discussed in easy-to-understand summaries. These can be set to be delivered daily or have it be shown on command. Users can summarise the past seven days or set a custom date range.
Finally, conversation summaries do the same thing but for a particular thread or a conversation. The company says users can get a gist of the discussion in a single click using Slack AI with citations to denote where the source was taken from. In future, the company plans to add a note-taking and summarising feature within its Huddle voice and video calling interface to save time. “Businesses of all sizes are already saving an average of 97 minutes per user each week, according to an internal analysis of our pilot customers,” claimed the platform.
