Adding a new wrinkle to the highly competitive team chat market, Slack Technologies Inc. today unveiled Actions, a new feature that gives its 8 million users an easier way to access the services they rely on in their work.

Actions, introduced at a developer event today, is in many respects an expansion of the chat platform’s Slash Commands. These are messages beginning with a slash symbol that act as triggers, enabling users to initiate an action in one of the many outside services that provide an integration for Slack. Actions puts a visual spin on this concept.

The feature is fused into the Slack interface. When users wish to perform a certain task, they simply have to select a chat message and bring up the new Action drop-down menu, which will display the available integrations.

Actions are available for several popular services on launch. Users can, for example, select a message posted by their team leader and use the key details to create a new to-do item in JIRA Cloud, a leading project management tool. Or they might instead add the same message as a comment to an existing item.

The visual nature of Actions should make them an appealing alternative to Slash Commands, particularly for teams that would need to memorize commands for multiple outside services. The new feature might even be capable of substituting chatbots in certain situations. When it comes to multistep actions, for example, using the Action drop-down menu may be faster than holding a back-and-forth conversation with a bot.

This lends itself to speeding up a potentially wide range of tasks. Actions could consequently give Slack a usability edge over other team chat platforms, although such an advantage may not last long if the capability proves popular. Just as they’ve matched Slack’s chatbot support, competitors such as Microsoft Corp. and Atlassian Corp. Plc may move to bake similar features into their rival communications services.

Image: Slack