Slack swallows even more of your life with long-awaited feature

Slack is taking aim at the wheelhouse of one of its chief rivals with a new video-calling feature.

The workplace chat service announced a hotly anticipated tool on Tuesday that will for the first time let co-workers chat face-to-face, in groups or individually, within the platform. 

The move ups the competition between the company and Microsoft-owned competitor Skype for Work, which made its name in video conferencing, along with other services like Google Hangouts. It also follows rival HipChat's addition of a similar feature in August. 

The feature, which will roll out in the next few days, is an expansion to the audio calling tools that Slack has offered since this spring. Slack users can use it to either call other team members directly or organize calls of up to 15 people.

Image: slack

It's currently only available on Mac or PC desktop, but mobile users can participate in audio-only version of calls.

Like its audio calling, Slack's video chat features a special set of emojis including a "hand raise" to signal a pause for a question or a "thumbs up" to show approval.

The company makes clear in a blog post that the feature will not put an end to alternative third-party video conferencing integrations like those of Google Hangouts and Zoom.  

Slack has made no secret of its heated competition with Microsoft, even going so far as to take out a full-page newspaper ad addressed to the software giant last month. The addition of video tools only further fuels the marketing battle.