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Slack<\/a>, the workplace collaboration platform with 1.25 million paying users<\/a>\u00a0and 4 million overall, is adding\u00a0one more key feature\u00a0to its artillery of tools for people to communicate with each other, and it\u2019s one that could help it pick up even more users away from other services like Skype and gmail: it\u2019s adding video calling<\/a>, the audiovisual\u00a0complement to the audio\u00a0chat services that it released earlier this year. Group video calls, for those on paid tiers, can handle up to 15 people currently, Slack says.<\/p>\n Slack says the video calling feature, which will be available first on Slack for Mac and Windows on desktop and Google Chrome, in the next few days. Those on mobile will be able to join video calls but will experience them as audio only.<\/p>\n The service will work similar to its existing voice calling feature that it added earlier this year<\/a>, allowing users to turn on their cameras to each as well as hear each other. But it will also feature something else that is a twist on the many other video services out there today: emojis.<\/p>\n A lot of people who use video and audio conferencing for calls with work colleagues will turn on the mute button so that their random coughs and sighs or other ambient noise will not interrupt the soliloquies of their coworkers. Now if they want to make quick responses\u00a0to things they won\u2019t have to fumble around for the unmute button: instead they can offer a thumbs up, or a fist bump or a dancing banana, or whatever\u00a0is right for the moment.<\/p>\n We\u2019d heard back in March<\/a> that the company was going to be launching video chat at some point this year, and here it finally is. It\u2019s not clear if it\u2019s been built on the tech that Slack picked up\u00a0in 2015, when it acquired YC company Screenhero<\/a>, which had built a very light way for people to use video chat and share their screens with each other. (We\u2019ve asked and will update as we learn more.)<\/p>\n In any case, Slack says that by building its own video chat service, it\u2019s not planning at this point to remove the ability to use other services. Slack \u2014 built on the idea of integrating hundreds of other apps and services into its bigger platform with the simple use of slash commands \u2014 also works with services like Google Hangouts and Zoom and you can still set these as your default<\/a> if you prefer them to Slack\u2019s native experience.<\/p>\n While video calling will help Slack fill out more of its product as a\u00a0complete and standalone platform, it could also help with something else: Slack has been seeing some drop-off<\/a> in its still pretty massive user growth, and we\u2019d heard that there were also some issues with user retention alongside that. Meanwhile, video\u00a0is one of the more popular\u00a0services proven\u00a0increase the \u201cstickiness\u201d of sites by keeping people lingering around and engaging for longer; it will be interesting to see if it does the trick here, too.<\/p>\n