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Slack Calls: Now with video
- pcora 10y agoyay, more distraction! now in video
- joshmanders 10y agoI hope screen sharing comes soon. They bought Screen Hero a while back, and said they were integrating it.
- slantyyz 10y agoI was thinking the same, and actually looked into it after seeing this headline. If you are a paid subscriber to Slack, you can add the app to your Slack account for free. You still have to sign up for Screen Hero as well, but at least you can do it. link: https://slack.com/screenhero https://slack.com/screenhero
- newjobseeker 10y agoYou can use Screenleap in Slack: https://www.screenleap.com/slack-integration https://www.screenleap.com/slack-integration
- bazzargh 10y agoWe started using screenhero (paid) before the slack takeover, but were using paid-for slack too so nothing changed for us. The integration is fairly weak, you can launch a screenhero session from within chat but tbh I tend to use screenhero's own UI instead. Still the best tool I've used for remote pairing.
- tiv 10y agoMy team uses Screenhero on a daily basis because it's the only screen sharing software we've found that lets us all point (and drive) without having to wait turns or specifically request control. Unfortunately, it has a host of issues and we end up having to restart our daily meeting call several times each day because of them. I'd hoped that Slack buying them would result in a more polished product, but I haven't heard a thing about it since the acquisition.
- rkuykendall-com 10y ago"I haven't heard a thing about it since the acquisition" I heard they got audio calls, and then video calls, working in the main app. If I were working to integrate Screen Hero with Slack, that's where I'd start.
- elliotlarson 10y agoYeah, right?! I had the exact same thought when I saw this. Okay, video... that's cool. But, we've been waiting for the ScreenHero purchase to turn into Slack screen sharing for ages.
- brazzledazzle 10y agoYou probably already know but until they finish the integration you can sign up for a screenhero account from Slack. I'm not sure if you need a paid account or what tier you'd need but it's definitely available on ours.
- jhgjklj 10y agoExactly i came to comment the same thing. Lynx sucks. Takes a hell lot of time to reconnect. Can't believe the product is maintained by top developers.
- brazzledazzle 10y agoI think you meant Lync and if so I agree wholeheartedly.
- calchris42 10y agoSlack calls are built on webRTC, and actually it isn't too bad adding screen sharing functionality with webRTC. I wrote a blog post on this recently. And actually, with the Screen Hero team on board, should be even way simpler for them. https://medium.com/@chris_82106/implementing-webrtc-screen-sharing-in-a-web-app-late-2016-51c1a2642e4#.8r36weqpt https://medium.com/@chris_82106/implementing-webrtc-screen-s...
- TorKlingberg 10y agoSlack uses WebRTC, and browsers are (understandably) picky about letting websites capture the users screen. It involves having each user install an extension and/or getting on global whitelists. And Safari and mobile browsers are basically impossible.
- kristopolous 10y agoDoes slack feel like IRC to anybody else? Sorry I didn't mean for this to be divisive or rude. I wasn't aware this was a common observation. I'm not trying to be negative or incriminate the product. I use and enjoy slack every day.
- FooBarWidget 10y agoNot sure what you want to say with that statement. Slack has a ton more features than IRC, so until IRC catches up and is easy to maintain I couldn't care less what Slack is written in.
- deleted 10y ago[deleted]
- Navarr 10y agoThat's mostly what Slack is and why people like it. IRC was (and still IS) good. Slack is basically a modern way to view and utilize the same basic system. It also made it very easy for developers to integrate components (whereas IRC you'd have to search out some way to do such integrations) - and with the "special" UX that they control they could add things like button actions on messages. A client like Slack for IRC with some of the newer IRC RFCs could potentially work just as well - as long as the UX and push notifications etc were nailed.
- kristopolous 10y agoIRC is a pain, yes. I made a C library to talk to IRC servers about (oh god) 15 years ago that I then put a perl wrapper around ... it provided a notification engine like the slack notifications I see today. But I had to cull all the hacker in me from 15 years ago to get it working right ... not an easy thing at all.
- DoodleBuggy 10y agoThat's pretty much exactly what it is, to me anyway. It's IRC for non-technical people (not that IRC is particularly technical, but...)
- cpeterso 10y agoThe call emoji support is a great idea for streamlining communication in a video meeting. Does video calling work in Slack's web client?
- aluminussoma 10y agoHas anyone else noticed how pristine the audio quality of a Slack call sounds? I wonder how they optimized it. My company's voip, and Lync, and Skype all fail to deliver the same kind of call quality. I've only noticed / admired better call quality when making a call within Cisco to another employee. I don't use video much but I hope they've done as good of a job as they did with audio.
- kosinus 10y agoI'm not sure what codec those products use, but I wouldn't be surprised if Slack went for Opus. Seems like it's the most popular choice these days, with little competition. (Discord also uses Opus.)
- zerocrates 10y agoSlack uses Opus.
- mypalmike 10y agoI'm pretty sure they use Pied Piper compression. *Wow, tough crowd.
- nkw 10y agoProbably a wide band or at least mid-band codec. One thing I learned working with VOIP is people perceive quality based on what they have been using recently, which for most people is the absolutely horribly stepped on audio of skype, cheap voip, or the cellphone network. Carriers have pretty much let their baseline audio quality go to \\\\ because no one cares anymore. (Remember the Sprint pin-drop campaign?) Now, when you give somebody a wide band high quality audio connection they are blown away.
- heywire 10y agoYeah, every once in a while when my wife calls me, we get what I'm assuming is an LTE voice call and the audio is great (AT&T HD voice, I believe). Outside of that, it is amazing how bad the call quality can be. You really notice it when listening to hold music. It is like the audio version of one of those old jpegs that looks like it has been recompressed each time the email was forwarded.
- carlcortright 10y agoThis just made slack 10x better.
- sergiotapia 10y agoI think the next step here would be screen-control from the Screenhero acquisition? Off-topic: The guy's beard looks like a Snapchat filter haha.
- vkjv 10y agoSlack calls have been broken in linux for a while--even though they worked when calling first launched. Is a fix for that on the horizon?
- rantanplan 10y agoWhat? No they're not. I use them every day on Fedora.
- vkjv 10y agoInteresting. I wonder if a dep changed. They don't work in Ubuntu 14.04.
- xpaulbettsx 10y agoYep, that's the GLIBC issue I mentioned. Easiest way to fix this is to upgraded to latest LTS
- xpaulbettsx 10y agoIf you're using RHEL, you've got a version of GLIBC that's too old, we're trying to figure out what to do about this without asking users to install a bunch of crazy stuff
- tormeh 10y agoI know dynamically linking to libraries is the Linux way, but wouldn't just bundling the correct version of glibc with the Slack app solve the problem? Sure, the app gets bigger, but a missing feature is worse than that, I would imagine.
- rayvd 10y agoThen Slack has to start tracking glibc updates and security fixes rather than relying on the OS. Might be acceptable overhead.
- 10y ago
- jonheller 10y agoExcellent. I do hope it's better than Hipchat's attempt, which I found to be terrible -- delayed audio and stuttering video.
- ts330 10y agolovely. the sooner i can remove skype from my life the better. that said, why can't any of these phone systems deal with the use case of two people trying to call each other and then simply auto connect the two calls? why does one side have to drop the call and answer the other?
- quicklyfrozen 10y agoBecause if you're calling someone you expect them to say hello. It's not that easy to explain to a user that the call they just placed was dropped and they're really now answering a call.
- nimchimpsky 10y agoI doubt thats the actual reason.
- Spooky23 10y agoTelephone use case has been around for a over a century. Fucking with the UI won't go over well.
- nimchimpsky 10y agoTo paraphrase all the other recently disrupted industries.
- kevinstubbs 10y agoI can't stand Skype's sign in/closing experience. Linking my original Skype account with a Microsoft email definitely broke something. Also why do I have to tell it to exit in 3 different ways to get it to finally exit for real!?
- omouse 10y agobad enough that I can be reached after work via slack and get calls while I'm on a commute (which is never compensated for aside from general salary), it'll have video? also, this only works in Chrome and on mobile, which is really messed up considering that Firefox is also a bleeding edge browser.
- dbg31415 10y agoJust set your Do Not Disturb hours... you won't get the calls. But I agree... more apps need to factor in if you are moving or not before placing calls or messages. I wish there was a way to say, "I only want music and maps when I drive..." on my phone and have it kill the connection and updates for everything else.
- Klathmon 10y agoThe new android-auto app for your phone can do exactly this. It overlays a nice "car UI" that's much larger and easier to not only see but also hit while driving, and basically only has phone, maps, and music. It hides all other notifications, it "silences" other sounds, and there's a setting to optionally run the app once you connect to a specific bluetooth device. I'm pretty happy with it.
- dbg31415 10y agoReally?! Ugh, wow... I'm not going to own any Apple products a year from now, am I?
- Klathmon 10y agoIf you are in the market for a phone, I can't recommend the Google Pixel enough. It's hands down the best Android phone I've ever owned. From the build quality, speed, features, and usability it just fucking nails it in every way.
- deleted 10y ago[deleted]
- cygned 10y agoOnly screen sharing and a dark theme are missing. Then it has everything I want as a developer.
- fpgaminer 10y agoDoes Slack have a phone bridge for voice calls? Would be helpful for participants who can't use Slack. If not, I wonder if their APIs allow a bot to join a voice call and get access to the audio...
- Klathmon 10y agoThis is the last thing we require before moving our team over from hangouts (which is the only thing we use even though we pay for the whole g-suite). Either a way to call-out, have external people call-in, or just allowing a connection of a 3rd party service (paid or otherwise) that lets us connect a phone line.
- parent5446 10y agoWhy don't you just use normal Hangouts? G Suite isn't required.
- Klathmon 10y agoWe were using many of the gsuite features previously, and just over time moved off one by one. Really we only have it now because it's nice to have support if needed, and having our work emails associated with the hangouts we do with people outside the company is nicer than everyone using their personal emails (with their personal profile pictures).
- giovannibajo1 10y agoWe constantly have problems with Slack audio calls, they seem not to be stable even over very stable internet and wifi. I wonder if being in Europe is a factor
- mackwerk 10y agoWe don't have problems with Slack calls, we're based in Copenhagen, Denmark and I frequently have full-day sessions with a colleague in Spain
- siminsayz 10y agoI had two colleagues suddenly have the chat text field filled with Chinese characters and emojis today so they were told to clean their pcs. Different environments and location but both using slack... heard of this ?
- geofft 10y agoNote that Chinese characters are the vast majority of characters, so (at least from your description) my guess would be "random bytes being interpreted as Unicode" instead of "Chinese hackers who like using emoji". If it's only Chinese characters and emoji, that's different.
- siminsayz 10y agoI had two colleagues suddenly have the chat text field filled with Chinese characters and emojis today so they were told to clean their pcs. Different environments and location but both using slack... heard of this ?
- ioseph 10y agoI feel video calls are the new email in Zawinski's Law
- fred_is_fred 10y agoWith video (again). Since they had it in 2014 and then yanked it out.
- tdburn 10y agoI'm looking forward to the promised threaded comments ability
- relics443 10y agoAnyone try this yet and compare it to Hangouts on a poor connection? I'm constantly dealing with colleagues in another office where the internet connection is sub-par.
- n00b101 10y agoCounting number of options I might have when trying to do a video/voice call with someone: 1. Facetime 2. Skype 3. Hangouts 4. GoToMeeting 5. Slack 6. Facebook 7. WhatsApp The fragmentation / lack of standards we had with IM is now a reality in video/voice calling as well.
- tonyplee 10y agoAlso line, wechat and webex, iMessage. IMO, competitions, choices with communication SW are very good for all users. I like all the apps, options, free, ads, paid, webbase, mobile, etc. No need for unified standard.
- stephenr 10y agoThe standard being referenced in the comment you replied to is about a standard protocol, not a single "standard" app. Think the web/browsers.
- bmatt 10y agoAlso tried Zoom (zoom.us) which worked quite nicely for small groups.
- notatoad 10y agofragmentation carries some negative connotation, but in this context it's a great simple way to maintain some division between your communities. my skype account gets given out to customers and various random people i need to connect to at work. video calls with co-workers happen using hangouts. whatsapp is for family. i don't really want to merge all of those contact pools into a single app.
- stephenr 10y agoIf we used standard/open IM/AV call protocols (lets say XMPP, and XMPP Jingle) you would just have two accounts, just like you have a personal and a work email address. You can then choose to either: - use a client that supports multiple accounts/profiles (either one at a time or multiple concurrent logins); or - use two separate apps. "I want to keep my private and work life separate" is not a good defence of fragmentation. By your logic, we should encourage every single email provider/software vendor/project to use their own subtly different protocol, and require the use of their own client software.
- edhelas 10y agoOne small question here. With their "Instant emoji reactions" looks like they are doing server side shape recognition, so Slack video-calls are not P2P (i.e. if I'm calling my colleague in my office the streams are going to the Slack servers before going back)?
- opayen 10y agoAs I understood, this part with printing emoji was just a joke :) What they are saying is that you can use regular emoji reactions while a video call.