Zoom’s Slack competitor is getting a new name and features

Many of us have been on a lot of Zoom calls during the pandemic, but you might not know that Zoom also has its very own Slack- and Microsoft Teams-esque product called Zoom Chat. On Monday, Zoom announced a small change to the name of the product — it’s now called Zoom Team Chat — alongside a handful of other handy updates coming to the collaboration software.

We should begin with the name change. Zoom is adding “Group” since clients were becoming befuddled about the contrast between the visit you can use in Zoom gatherings with the different correspondence suite. Renaming the item to Zoom Group Talk “helps make the qualification that it is a full cooperative center point item,” Sharvari Nerurkar, Zoom Group Visit’s head of item, said in a meeting with The Edge.

The idea for Zoom Team Chat is that it can be a singular collaboration hub where you can work with colleagues in real time on calls or asynchronously over text chat. If you’re like me, you may already be doing this mix of video, voice, and text to talk with your co-workers but across different pieces of software. (Here at The Verge, we typically chat over Slack but do video calls over Zoom.)

In the event that your working environment involves Zoom for video calls, you can hypothetically do a lot of your working environment correspondence in one spot with Zoom Group Visit without bouncing from application to application. “Our clients are letting us know that [they] don’t need the grating of leaping to numerous various items to team up with similar gathering,” Nerurkar said.

The idea for Zoom Team Chat is that it can be a singular collaboration hub where you can work with colleagues in real time on calls or asynchronously over text chat. If you’re like me, you may already be doing this mix of video, voice, and text to talk with your co-workers but across different pieces of software. (Here at The Verge, we typically chat over Slack but do video calls over Zoom.)

Assuming that your work environment involves Zoom for video calls, you can hypothetically do quite a bit of your working environment correspondence in one spot with Zoom Group Visit without hopping from application to application. “Our clients are letting us know that [they] don’t need the contact of leaping to various items to team up with similar gathering,” Nerurkar said.

To improve the experience of actually using Zoom Team Chat, Zoom has a few new features that it’s aiming to release by the end of the month. One update is that you’ll be able to share in-meeting chat right into Zoom Team Chat, making it easier to see any important notes (or your witty commentary) after the meeting is over. You’ll also be able to schedule a Zoom meeting right from a Zoom Team Chat channel, which could be useful if you’re having a text conversation that might lend itself to a call.

All things considered, Zoom is confronting savage contest from any semblance of Slack, Microsoft, and Google, which are all quickly working out their own work environment correspondence items to assist associations with adjusting to half breed workplaces. While the Zoom Group Talk reports on the way appear to be valuable, the organization might have a daunting struggle to persuade working environments to change to Zoom Group Visit from stages they could currently be know all about.