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Slack could soon summarize your files with AI (APK teardown)
- Strings found in a recent version of Slack for Android suggest that AI file summaries are coming to the platform.
- This would apparently summarize uploaded files such as PDFs and other documents for your convenience.
Slack is one of the most popular productivity platforms around, and the company hopped on the AI bandwagon back in February. The platform’s AI features currently include thread summaries, semantic search, and channel recaps. Now, it looks like Slack is taking a page from the likes of Gemini and ChatGPT for another upcoming feature.
An APK teardown helps predict features that may arrive on a service in the future based on work-in-progress code. However, it is possible that such predicted features may not make it to a public release.
We dug into a recent version of the Slack app for Android (version 24-10-50-0) and discovered plenty of references to AI file summary functionality. A few of the most notable strings are seen below.
<string name="ai_file_summary_title">AI Summary</string>
<string name="ai_file_summary_loading_message">An AI file summary will be ready here soon…</string>
<string name="ai_file_summary_too_large_content_error_message">Something went wrong generating a summary — either too much to summarize or too large of a file.</string>
<string name="ai_file_summary_empty_content_error_message">Not enough text to summarize</string>
<string name="ai_file_summary_not_readable_error_message">There was an issue summarizing this file. This may be because of the format, or because it’s password protected.</string>
<string name="ai_file_summary_removal_dialog_body">A preview of the file’s AI summary will no longer appear when the file is shared in a conversation.</string>Two of the above strings suggest that file summaries won’t work with some formats, files that have been password-protected, or files that are too large. It also looks like the feature has a minimum and maximum limit in terms of how much content can be summarized. Nevertheless, we’re guessing that PDFs and Word/text document formats should be supported at the very least. A few strings also point to the AI summary being appended to the file when shared. That wouldn’t be a surprise as Slack already appends transcripts to videos.
Other strings with the “ai_file_summary” tag point to even more functionality, such as the ability to delete summaries. It also looks like you can give feedback about the feature, such as the level of detail and the summary’s accuracy.
<string name="ai_file_summary_delete">Remove and delete summary</string>
<string name="ai_file_summary_delete_dialog_body">This will delete the AI summary from file details. This cannot be undone.</string>
<string name="ai_file_summary_feedback_accuracy_negative">Information was inaccurate</string>
<string name="ai_file_summary_feedback_accuracy_positive">Information was accurate</string>
<string name="ai_file_summary_feedback_detail_negative">Included too much or too little detail</string>
<string name="ai_file_summary_feedback_detail_positive">Level of detail was helpful</string>
<string name="ai_file_summary_feedback_readability_negative">Layout was difficult to read</string>
<string name="ai_file_summary_feedback_readability_positive">Layout was easy to read</string>Nevertheless, file summaries would be a handy tool for Slack as it means you don’t have to switch to Gemini or another AI assistant to get a quick rundown of a document or other type of file.