Slack now supports pronunciation guides in profiles

Not everyone is on board with the idea of remote work. But for those who are, Slack’s new profile features released today should make some workday tasks, particularly onboarding, a bit easier.

Slack now supports pronunciation guides for profiles, allowing users to add name pronunciations in the form of phonetic spellings or audio recordings. They’ll begin appearing today for some users under the Display Name and Pronounce sections across Slack clients, with a full rollout to start in the coming weeks.

Name pronunciations build on Slack’s other inclusivity efforts, including a field for pronouns in profiles.

In a related development, Hover Cards — essentially pop-ups — have arrived in Slack. Moving a cursor over a person’s name will reveal a condensed Hover Card version of their profile, along with links to start a “huddle” (i.e., audio conversation), call or direct message.

Image Credits: Slack

Lastly, Slack profiles now include three new fields: Contact Information, People and About Me. Contact Information shows email and phone details, while People lists the teams the person works with and their place in the organization’s hierarchy. About Me is more dynamic in nature, but can contain things like start date, languages spoken and even pets and birthdays, depending on what the user chooses to share.

Other Slack upgrades pertain to Atlas, Slack’s premium add-on for its Business+ and Enterprise Grid plans. A new data type called Smart Tags lets admins create custom fields that convert into searchable, filterable tags like “expertise,” “focus area” and “languages.” Flexible Text, another upgrade, enables profile fields to support up to 5,000 rich text characters including bullet points, links, line breaks, code blocks, emoji and more.

Image Credits: Slack

“By helping people understand who their colleagues are as humans, our redesigned profiles make it easier for teammates to collaborate, feel connected and do their best work together,” Maxwell Hayman, director of product at Slack, said in a statement.