
Slack Calls: Now with video - tilt
https://slackhq.com/slack-calls-now-with-100-more-video-50bf365a0d98#.tdyzbe5fc
======
joshmanders
I hope screen sharing comes soon. They bought Screen Hero a while back, and
said they were integrating it.

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elliotlarson
Yeah, 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
You 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.

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aluminussoma
Has 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.

~~~
lobster_johnson
Slack's audio quality is on par with GoToMeeting, I think.

Of all the different solutions I've visited (Google Hangouts, Skype, Slack,
Zoom, Join.me etc.), G2M has been the most reliable and best-sounding one that
I've found. It's got things like native Mac app, screen sharing (just one
presenter, unfortunately), audio/video recording, telephone dial-in, calendar
scheduling, and persistence (i.e. you can reuse the same meeting every day).
It uses little bandwidth and behaves really well on a low-bandwidth
connection. And unlike GH, we've never experienced any issues connecting or
staying connected.

The only thing I miss is the ability for it to pipe back a little bit of my
own audio, the way I believe phones do, so that you can talk while wearing
earbuds or a closed headset. (Without this, you won't hear your own voice,
which I find too unnerving.)

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Sebguer
You can generally do this in your computer's sound settings by specifying that
you want to listen to your recording device.

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lobster_johnson
Not on macOS, I believe. According to the other commenter, this is called
sidetone, and requires external hardware [1].

[1] [https://www.citrix.com/blogs/2016/03/22/gotomeeting-audio-
ha...](https://www.citrix.com/blogs/2016/03/22/gotomeeting-audio-hardware-for-
a-busy-office/)

~~~
rolodato
I believe you can use Loopback [1] for this (paid). If not, JACK [2] would
certainly work but it's a bit of a hassle to get everything set up.

[1]
[https://www.rogueamoeba.com/loopback/](https://www.rogueamoeba.com/loopback/)

[2] [http://www.jackosx.com/](http://www.jackosx.com/)

~~~
j_s
I also have not tried it myself, but it appears the LineIn tool on their
freebies page is exactly what is needed:

[https://www.rogueamoeba.com/freebies/](https://www.rogueamoeba.com/freebies/)

 _hear the sound coming in through a microphone_

Edit: It is specifically called out in the Citrix blog referenced above as not
working well enough. Not sure if the Loopback software would be any different,
but it does offer a free trial.

~~~
lobster_johnson
The LineIn page says:

> New in 2.3: A long-standing issue with latency in LineIn has finally been
> cured! We've also added a menu item for toggling play-thru.

I'll try it out.

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ts330
lovely.

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
Because 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.

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nimchimpsky
I doubt thats the actual reason.

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Spooky23
Telephone use case has been around for a over a century. Fucking with the UI
won't go over well.

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nimchimpsky
To paraphrase all the other recently disrupted industries.

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giovannibajo1
We 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

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mackwerk
We 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

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fpgaminer
Does 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...

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Klathmon
This 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.

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parent5446
Why don't you just use normal Hangouts? G Suite isn't required.

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Klathmon
We 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).

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n00b101
Counting 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.

~~~
notatoad
fragmentation 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
If 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.

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ioseph
I feel video calls are the new email in Zawinski's Law

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cygned
Only screen sharing and a dark theme are missing. Then it has everything I
want as a developer.

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omouse
bad 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
Just 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
The 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
Really?! Ugh, wow... I'm not going to own any Apple products a year from now,
am I?

~~~
Klathmon
If 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.

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edhelas
One 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)?

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opayen
As 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.

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carlcortright
This just made slack 10x better.

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relics443
Anyone 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.

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vkjv
Slack 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?

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xpaulbettsx
If 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

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tormeh
I 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.

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TheDong
You cannot sanely statically link glibc.

This is because libnss effectively has to (by definition of how
/etc/nsswitch.conf works) be able to `dlopen` arbitrary files you don't know
about, so statically linking it has no meaning or breaks that (you pick!).

For this reason, it's painful-to-difficult to bundle glibc with a program, and
it _WILL_ break some networking configuration options if you do it, which is
probably worse than messing up a feature on an ancient linux no one should be
using :)

The _right_ solution to this, which for some dumb reason they don't want to
do, is ship a different version of slack depending on your (distro, glibc)
combo. For old RHEL and old Ubuntu, they just need to ship a version that is
built against those old glibc versions.

It's trivial if they just open source their application and ask Redhat and
Canonical to maintain packages of them and provide sufficient motivation (read
money) to convince them to also package them for these old distros.

I don't know why the no-brainer idea of forcing redhat/canonical (who are
experts on this glibc stuff and making debs and rpms in general) to maintain
the slack packages for those distros hasn't occurred to them

~~~
xpaulbettsx
> The right solution to this, which for some dumb reason they don't want to do

WebRTC requires GCC >= 4.9, which doesn't ship on RHEL or old Ubuntu, and
upgrading to it would also upgrade the built glibc, which defeats the point.

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jonheller
Excellent. I do hope it's better than Hipchat's attempt, which I found to be
terrible -- delayed audio and stuttering video.

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fred_is_fred
With video (again). Since they had it in 2014 and then yanked it out.

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tdburn
I'm looking forward to the promised threaded comments ability

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siminsayz
I 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 ?

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geofft
Note 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.

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sergiotapia
I 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.

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cpeterso
The call emoji support is a great idea for streamlining communication in a
video meeting.

Does video calling work in Slack's web client?

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kristopolous
Does 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.

~~~
jamestenglish
Wow quick to the low effort Slack is just IRC comment.

In my opinion Slack does something that is often very undervalues and easily
overlooked, it is like the opposite of a death my a thousand cuts -
superiority by a thousand minor improvements.

When taken individually or even in handfuls none of the features are that
impressive, but cumulatively it creates a much better product. This was very
apparent to me at least when I switched from HipChat to Slack. Just reading
features or looking at screenshots they are nearly identical, yet with actual
use Slack seems like a significant step up.

So yes IRC is to Slack, as the Ford Model T is to a Mercedes S-Class.

~~~
kristopolous
The one thing that I liked (and still like) about IRC is its federated server
model. Maybe I need to do more research, but I guess I am assuming that slack
is a for-profit company with private servers that they own somewhere that
everyone uses ... or am I totally off?

~~~
vertex-four
If you're looking for "a better IRC" while still not tying your communications
to a single data silo, Matrix[0] with the Riot[1] client is currently the best
experience.

The brilliant bit is that you can set up your own homeserver which holds all
your chat logs, can authenticate against whatever you like (internal
username/password, LDAP, or even CAS single sign-on), and allows you to
communicate with people and rooms on other homeservers without having to
manually connect, create a dozen different accounts, etc.

I think right now, 50% of users are on the matrix.org homeserver and 50% are
on their own homeservers. And the upside of everyone being on a homeserver is
that everyone essentially has their own bouncer by default - no more having to
set up ZNC on some random VPS on a user-by-user basis, you can always message
anyone and they'll get your message whenever they reconnect.

Because of its federated model, you can also use it to communicate with other
companies and customers as well as internal communications - something
Slack/etc aren't really chasing after.

[0] [https://matrix.org](https://matrix.org) [1]
[https://riot.im](https://riot.im)

~~~
kristopolous
Alright let's go further ... so how is this different from XMPP rooms?
([http://xmpp.org/extensions/xep-0045.html](http://xmpp.org/extensions/xep-0045.html))

XMPP can support all the other things you've mentioned.

~~~
vertex-four
While XMPP is wonderful in theory, in practice, it's very difficult to assume
that any given set of client+server can support anything, especially once
you're talking to people on other servers. Even things like the features
allowing messages to be delivered to multiple clients, rather than only one,
are rarely implemented according to the standard. Matrix has a reference
server and client which supports the entire protocol, so any other
implementation will hopefully wind up implementing at least the majority of
it, or won't be used.

~~~
kristopolous
XMPP hasn't really played out to its promises. Pity, it's such a great set of
technology.

There's something to learn from this - there's likely a "right amount" of
anarchy, some goldilock zone where people can still be creative and unburdened
but not so much that things become fractured, fragmented, and incoherent.

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pcora
yay, more distraction! now in video

