Slack is working on an AI feature that will help summarize uploaded files

In February, Slack announced its foray into the AI world with the launch of its generative AI companion. It was designed to offer answers to work-related queries, provide a summary of conversations, and help condense long threads.

Now, it appears that Slack will expand the generative AI features to more areas of the platform. During the teardown of the latest version of the Slack Android app v24-10-50-0, plenty of strings referencing the AI file summary were detected. Some of the most notable are listed below:

AI Summary
An AI file summary will be ready here soon…
Something went wrong generating a summary — either too much to summarize or too large of a file.
Not enough text to summarize
There was an issue summarizing this file. This may be because of the format, or because it’s password protected.
A preview of the file’s AI summary will no longer appear when the file is shared in a conversation.

One of the strings suggests that the Slack AI summarize feature will not work with certain formats (details unknown). Also, the AI feature may not be able to summarize password-protected files or files that are too large. Additionally, it appears that there is a maximum and minimum file size limit to how much content can be summarized by Slack's under-development AI summarize tool.

It would be safe to say that users should be able to summarize PDFs and Word/text documents without any issues. There are a few strings that suggest that the AI summary could be attached to the file when it is shared.

There are a bunch of other strings that give us insight into the additional functionalities of the upcoming Slack AI summarize feature. It seems like the feature could have the ability to delete summaries, give feedback about the feature, and also get the level of accuracy of the summary and other details.

Slack AI summarize feature would prevent users from switching to Gemini or other AI assistants to get a quick summary of their files. Notably, the feature is still under development, with no said plans for a wide rollout.

Source: Android Authority