Slack Can Use AI to Transcribe Your Huddle Conversations Now
As companies continue to push AI as anything from a web designer to the equivalent of a whole film studio, one of its more tried-and-true use cases has been as a personal secretary and, more specifically, a stenographer. Apple and Google are adding AI-generated transcripts to your phone calls, and now, the ability's coming to your office, too.
Technically, AI transcripts have been part of work culture for a while, through third-party sites like Otter.ai and, more recently, even video calling apps like Zoom or Google Meet themselves. The idea is to have the AI take notes during your call, so you can be fully present in your meeting, or so people who missed it can quickly get back up to speed. Unfortunately, the reality's been a little more limited than that, but now Slack is looking to give more detailed AI meeting notes than the competition.
While Zoom's AI Companion and Google Meet's Gemini integration both focus more on high-level meeting summaries, Slack says its AI's huddle notes are more fully featured. Here, the company promises that the AI bot will make a full transcript of your meeting, although you'll still get high-level notes in addition, with the latter focusing on key citations, action items, and shared files.
Anyone in the channel or direct message where the huddle started will be able to view the transcript and notes, helping keep them private while still letting folks catch up on what was said, even regular collaborators who might have been out for that particular call.
Whether that's enough to get teams to switch from taking their calls on Zoom to taking them on Slack is still up in the air. Personally, I feel I would get more use out of a transcription than a summary, as notes require the AI to make judgment calls about what is and isn't important enough to include. Meanwhile, an automatic transcription would just take some tedium out of my day.
Slack AI, which huddle notes are a part of, is available now, and like Gemini for Google Workspace or Zoom AI Companion, it is a paid add-on for Pro, Business+, and Enterprise plans. If your team has it, you can simply click the Slack AI button in the bottom left of your huddle, then click Start Notes" in the following pop-up to have it start the transcription. My team doesn't have this plan (yet), so I unfortunately have not been able to test it myself.
Slack AI's huddle notes join existing features, including text-based conversation summaries.