When you’re working remotely, most communications are through email or messages on platforms like Slack. The lack of verbal communication between colleagues on remote working sometimes leads to incomplete knowledge of colleagues. For example, the incorrect pronunciation of a colleague’s names in a meeting could be embarrassing. But Slack is attempting to solve this issue with audio name pronunciation. The new feature allows each user to add name pronunciation guides to the profile. Uses can do this through recording audio or adding phonetic spelling. You can also see a preview of what the profile looks like with the phonetic spelling added below. Phonetic spelling will sit just below a user’s name, while a little speaker icon that can be clicked to play the pronunciation sits just beside the name.
Slack brings audio name pronunciations to the platform
Slack also brought a new pop-up user card UI that contains some basic information about the person. The pop-up appears when you hover your mouse over someone’s name. The full user profile also offers information like Contact Info, People (where you sit in your company’s org chart), and About Me (customizable with things like languages spoken, start date, etc.) The audio name pronunciations and pop-up user cards will be available to users from June 1st. However, it might take some time for all users worldwide to access the feature. Since the Covid-19 outbreak, Slack brought some new collaborative features to its platform to make remote working more enjoyable. For example, it now allows users to list their pronouns. Another great feature that was added to Slack last year was a discord-like audio feature called “Huddles.” The Huddles feature lets users share the pre-recorded audio and video with group members. Despite the fact that Covid-19 has slowed down in many countries and employees have returned to offices for a while, there are still many employees who prefer to continue working remotely. A feature like audio name pronunciations facilitates remote working and reinforces communications between colleagues.
