Another feature that's new this month is the ability to schedule messages to send at a time that’s convenient for the recipients, rather than right away - particularly useful when people in a team are working different hours or in different timezones.

This is designed to make it easier to connect to colleagues across an organization and understand the skills, interests and roles that each brings to the distributed team.

Today also sees the first release of Slack Atlas, an enterprise directory based on Slack's acquisition of Rimeto last year.

Viewers can have controls that allow them to speed up or slow down the replay, or they can read the simultaneous transcript, which is also archived and searchable, or use it to jump to specific points. Recording a short video or voice message is already commonplace in consumer messaging - Slack is now bringing the same quick convenience to the work environment, with the option of easily adding a screenshare with either voice or video commentary.

The second new feature is the ability to easily create and share short video, voice and screen recordings directly in a Slack channel, for others to watch on-demand and respond, on desktop or mobile.

But unlike office conversations, Huddles also have live captioning and archivable transcripts.

Slack describes its new Huddles audio chat feature as 'a lightweight, audio-first way of communicating in Slack channels or DM threads,' calling it 'a space to talk through work on the fly.' The idea is to replicate the unscheduled, informal discussions that happen all the time in an office environment, from morning greetings to pre-meeting preps and impromptu debriefs.

They bring audio chat and recorded video clips to Slack channels and DMs, aiming to fill out some of the extra capabilities distributed teams will need as the world emerges out of lockdown into the hybrid working patterns of the Vaccine Economy. Today saw messaging platform Slack roll out a couple of alternative solutions that it's been working on since first mooting them as long ago as last October.

How do you reproduce the immediacy of everyone working in the same office when we're all working from different locations? It quickly became evident last year that sitting on end-to-end Zoom calls isn't the answer.

Slack chime