Slack's Highlights feature finally solves its biggest issue using machine learning

Slack is finally addressing one of its biggest issue: distraction. The company’s latest Highlights feature will let you ignore all the noise, and only focus on the important highlights. Highlights show up under the All Unreads page on Slack, where you’ll be able to see some of the important conversations you might’ve missed out on while you’re on holiday or simply away from your computer.

Highlights use machine learning to predict what’s important to you. In fact, it will even show you why a conversation was shown as a highlight in some cases. You will also be able to provide feedback about the highlights that were automatically selected by Slack, which will help improve the feature in the future. As Highlights is powered by machine learning, the feature gets smarter over time which means you’ll get much more personalized highlights as you provide more feedback and use the feature over time.

Best of all, Highlights become more personalized over time. The teammates you work with and the channels you frequent teach Slack the ins and outs of what matters to you. And if a Highlight was particularly useful?—?or perhaps missed the mark?—?you can provide direct feedback via the thumbs up and down icons on each Highlight.

Slack’s Highlights feature is currently rolling out to all users on desktop, but it’s only available to users on teams with paid subscriptions.