Today, Salesforce announced that Slack AI is now available to all paid Slack customers (previously it was only available to enterprise customers). Additionally, Slack AI now supports Spanish and Japanese (along with English) and has new features include Search Answers, Conversation Summaries, and a new Recap feature. Slack AI is priced at $10 per user per month for Slack Pro and Business+ plans and as a paid add-on for all paid Slack plans.
According to Jackie Rocca, VP of Product, AI with Slack, the average Slack user spends more than 90 minutes per day actively using Slack. “For many companies, their most valuable resource is their people, so we want to help them better find what they're looking for and help them get through their day with more focus.”
With Search Answers, users receive personalized, intelligent responses to conversational questions with direct citations to relevant Slack messages. Conversation Summaries generates highlights from channels and threads accessible to the user. Rocca noted that users can only summarize channels they’re already a part of and, when it comes to search, that only includes their personal search corpus. These features are “tailored to the user and built on the same kind of access model that Slack has today,” she said.
Slack’s new Recap feature is a little different than generative AI-powered summarization. The difference lies, at least in part, in the automation Recap enables. Users add channels to Recap and then, every morning, they receive an automatically generated summary of what happened in those channels. The following animation shows how it works.
“I actually use [Recap] to start my day,” Rocca said. “I have this ‘morning digest’ of all the things that are happening at the company that I want to stay in the loop on, so I usually keep some time in the morning to just catch up.”
The ‘Rejoice!’ notification is highlighted in the screenshot below. In this demo, Slack estimates that this user saved 12 minutes by using the feature. According to Rocca, the time saved estimate is based on the number of messages that were summarized, the length of those messages and the amount of time it would take an average person to read those messages.
“[Slack AI and Recap] compares that to the amount of content the user’s reading in the summary and how much time they're spending on the summary,” Rocca said. “It's [basically] taking an apples-to-apples comparison of actually reading through all the channel versus getting the summaries or recaps of those channels.”
Rocca’s own Recap ‘Rejoice!’ notification put the demo’s to shame: “I had 1,204 messages this morning across 33 channels, which resulted in 132 minutes saved,” Rocca said. “I'm part of quite a few active conversations.”
Rocca said further that for now, this ‘time saved’ metric is only available in Recap. “We're really eager to see if people like it and we are considering bringing it to other features like the channel summaries,” Rocca said. “We are open to including this kind of content across the different Slack AI experiences, but we're eager to get more feedback before we make that change.”
No Jitter spoke with Slack earlier this year:
