A surprise release came upon us today, when Slack released the voice calling feature which they had announced yesterday that would start ‘very soon’. So far it was only made available as a feature for desktop and Chrome browser. While it’s not yet available for mobile nor all of its users as it only pushed the feature to roughly 50 percent of users, it’ll probably be made available for the rest just as soon. At least, if we’re to judge according to how Slack likes to do things, apparently.

This doesn’t come as much of a shock, however, as it was apparent that Slack had been trying to find a way to adapt voice calling in its application for a long time. One obvious example is its attempt to get integrated with other voice calls apps such as Skype, Zoom, Google Hangouts and Bluejeans. However, the company decided to take the only other alternative when it realized that separate integration tool installation in other to make it work with the other applications was tiresome.

Slack has already established itself as a service used by businesses for secure communication, even if it was entering a market that already had some well-known ‘residents’. And while Slack has yet to be that innovative presence in this field, they are slowly catching up and catching up well. While the voice calling feature is yet to become a full-fledged part of the service. Even if it’s on a grand scale, it’s still in the testing phase.

Slack revealed details regarding its roadmap for this year at the conference in San Francisco and had already confirmed with the occasion that their voice chat feature will be rolled out to desktops first, then on all the other supported platforms such as mobile. While it’s yet to be made a part of the calling experience, video calls are planned to be released in the Slack application too.

So far, the way it works is that any Slack group is capable of setting up a call that all the ones involved in can join at any point. Those added will receive a notification that the call has been created and may join in. It works similarly for individuals who are in the same channel.

One fun but hardly useful feature that has been added to the whole voice calling feature is the ability to express your emotions through emojis that appear on your profile picture. According to some sources, this is the polite way of expressing how you feel about what your partner is saying without interrupting them.

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