Freeing up knowledge workers from repetitive tasks is the new frontier for  Silicon Valley’s team collaboration providers.

On Tuesday, Slack Technologies Inc. launched Workflow Builder, a tool that can automate common actions like sending a help desk request. Today, project management startup Asana Inc. unveiled a toolkit called Asana Automation that will provide similar time savings for its users. 

Valued at $1.5 billion as of its last funding round, the startup offers a popular to-do task tracking service for teams that works something like a virtual whiteboard. It allows users to see what outstanding work they and their colleagues need to get done, as well as track project progress. The new Automation toolkit’s flagship feature is Rules, a tool that promises to streamline how to-do items are managed.

Rules is essentially a more specialized version of IFTTT. Workers can configure it to automatically post to-do items shared in Slack to their team’s Asana board, sync boards among tasks and perform other actions in the same vein. Rules is launching with more than 70 ready-made workflows, plus an editor that allows users to create custom workflows from scratch.

Another area where Asana has decided to apply automation is scheduling. From now, when the startup’s platform detects a conflict between task deadlines, it will correct the error to spare team leads the trouble of manually rejigging their to-do list.

The other features included in the Automation toolkit are rolling out for the Asana iOS app. They include Asana Voice, which allows users to dictate to-do items using their phone’s microphone, and a similar entry creation capability called Asana Vision that works with the camera. The latter tool can extract key information from images such as a photo of a brainstorming diagram on a whiteboard to generate new project assignments.

Asana Automation represents the latest in a series of recent product updates from the startup. Previously, it released Workload, a dashboard through which managers can check the progress of multiple projects in one place and assess employee productivity. The startup’s recently added features won’t necessarily appeal to every team, but they should allow it to better target the power users who are most likely to purchase premium subscriptions.

Asana claims more than 1 million organizations have signed up for its platform to date. The startup is led by Facebook Inc. co-founder Dustin Moskovitz (pictured, right) and Justin Rosenstein (left), who headed the social network’s engineering team in its early days.

Photo: Asana