How to Use Slack Huddles (Plus AI Notes & Transcript) (Full Transcript)

[00:00:00] Speaker 1: Did you know you can call people in Slack? Check this out. Hello and welcome back to Slack School. My name is Mike Reynolds. I'm your host. I'm part of the Slack team here at Salesforce. And today we're talking about huddles. Huddles are a native, lightweight video conference tool that's built right into Slack. You don't have to install anything. You could just start using it. It's really, really easy. Matter of fact, we should just dive in. But before I do, why don't you jump into the Slack community workspace, slackcommunity.com, and you could do this as well. Huddles are an easy, integrated, native way for us to communicate with our peers. So let's check this out. What I can do is I can go to this direct message that I have with myself. And up here, I have this little emoji that is like headphones. And if I click on that, it's going to start a huddle. You can also start a huddle by doing the shortcut that it's showing you here. That's Command Shift plus H. But I'm going to go ahead and click the button. Now, we get a preview of what we're going to see. So if I want to turn my camera on, I just click here. Hi, me. And if I want to turn my microphone off in advance, I can do that as well. I can choose the different mic audio settings that I want or video settings. But right now, I'm just going to click Start Huddle. Now, of course, I'm calling myself. So let's see. That's perfect. Look at that. We've got a connected huddle with me and myself. So huddles are really nice. They give us a lot of native tools and a lot of flexibility of things that you'd typically want to see out of a lightweight video conferencing tool. So in this instance, we've got the basics covered. There's sound and video. That's a lot, but that's just the basics. We can do more. The first thing I want to talk about is threads. Every huddle has a thread. Just like you've got a message, and then you can have sort of a threaded conversation below that message, the huddle works the same way. The huddle is sort of like a message, and then there's a thread that goes below. If I start sending messages here, those messages are going to live inside this thread forever, and we'll both be able to go back and look at those if we need them. Now, another thing that I can do is, of course, I can turn on AI Notes and Transcription. I'm a big fan of having AI Notes and Transcription as an option for huddles. I don't always need them, but they are very handy because this is going to be recording everything that I say, and then it's going to be able to take some notes for me. If I wanted to, in my thread, I can have my own conversation, but I can also have the AI Notes taking that transcription down and then summarizing things for me after the fact. That's really convenient, very handy, 10 out of 10, would recommend. But of course, it's an option. You don't have to have that on. Another thing that you can do is you can take meeting notes very simply in a canvas. Big fan of having canvases. They let us do so much, and having them within a huddle is very convenient. But that's sort of what Slack is here for. Slack is bringing together all of the different tools that you need and then connecting them so that it's very easy for you to do, right? It's perfect. So the next thing I want to show you is that we have reactions. Reactions are one of my favorite things. If you click down here, I can send any reaction I want, and they're very nice. It'll just pop up there in the corner. But some of our reactions are a little bit more fun. If I go up to the effects, I could choose one of these, and you get a better reaction. It's always entertaining. Another thing that I think is very convenient, particularly when you get on calls that have a lot of people involved, the same thing's going to be true when you get on a huddle that has a lot of people. It's nice to be able to raise your hand and say, hey, I would like to speak next. You could do that very easily by just hitting this button. And of course, I can lower my hand. I could also say, hey, I'm going to go grab coffee. This is something I do all the time. It's easy to do that here. So this was pretty good. If I go ahead and leave the huddle, which I can do from that screen down there, as you'll see, when I leave that huddle, we can now take a look at what's here. Sunny has not disconnected from the huddle yet, so I could rejoin the huddle just by jumping in here.

[00:05:06] Speaker 2: AI notes and transcription on.

[00:05:09] Speaker 1: Ah, AI notes are still on? I get that warning. That's nice and convenient. You'd hate to jump into a call and not know that that was happening. Once a huddle is over, if you've had AI notes and transcription on, they will go ahead and process. It takes a little bit of time, not very long, and you'll see this type of message pop up. You and Mike were in a huddle for seven minutes. AI notes will be ready soon. And then that gets replaced with this canvas. I can also click here, and I'll see this. AI huddle notes are ready. Edit share and assign action items or scroll them away for later. If we open up the canvas, we can see a pretty good detailed set of notes. So having this as an AI feature that lives natively inside of Slack is one of my favorite things to do. I can't tell you how many times I hop on the phone with somebody just for a few minutes and then realize I really want to be taking notes. From that moment forward, I can turn this on, and then all of a sudden, we can have a genuine conversation, a real meeting, and all of these notes are going to be taken for me. That is such a game changer. It's such a good easy win. This will talk about who was there, it will give a summary of everything that happened with citations, timestamps, and it will draft some action items. This is pretty nice. I didn't ask it to do that. It just did it on its own. I can also go up and view the transcript if I want to see exactly what happened. You'll note it starts only when I started it. So there was a bit of that conversation that happened before those were on. It doesn't pretend like the call started just when I hit that button. Also, if you turn it off at some point in time, you'll notice that it just stops right when you turned it off. Very, very convenient. One last thing. In our left menu bar, I can come up and see I have a Huddles Options below Threads. When I click on this, it's going to give me the option to start a huddle. If I wanted to build a huddle with a couple of people, I can do that right here. It'll show me recent huddles that I've had where I've clearly been talking to myself a lot this morning. So there you have it. Huddles are a really easy way to communicate with your peers natively inside of Slack. Share screens, annotate screens, take notes, invite as many people as you need on your team up to 50. You can find out more in the Slack Community workspace at slackcommunity.com. When you sign up on the Slack Community website, we'll send you a link to join our workspace. It's the same workspace that I used to demo huddles just a moment ago. If you have any questions, you can always ask them in the Slack School channel. And in that Slack School channel, I have a workflow where you can give me ideas for an episode. This is something you should do because I have a few of these that I can give away. So each month, I'm going to pick one person who submits the workflow randomly, and I'm going to send them one of these. So if you'd like your very own huddles record, fill out the workflow. Don't forget to like and subscribe. We'll see you next time.

[00:08:30] Speaker 2: Hey, you look good today.

[00:08:43] Speaker 1: I must be boring him.