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Comment by surge | Hacker News Reader

Probably going to use it to replace Chime.

Edit: For those that have never heard of it, its their own IM, that while publicly available, is mostly used internally for company communications, similar to Slack or Skype for Business.

https://aws.amazon.com/chime/

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Chime itself is an acquisition (which also has the dubious reputation of being the poorest execution of any AWS product) at a time when UCaaS companies like urbanconference and dialpad were going strong, and AWS wanted in on that action: https://techcrunch.com/2016/11/23/justin-biba-amazon-video/

Amazon internally uses Slack for chats, while Chime is mostly used for video conferencing.

My guess would be that this could augment Chime, and position it to be a useful part of GovCloud offering from Amazon.

Unless this changed in the last year, this is incorrect. Everyone was pushed to Chime after it was released.

Amazon rolled out Slack in summer 2020.

Slack is not used by operations as much unfortunately, running in hybrid mode since last August...

Maybe? Although Amazon recently started using Slack as its primary internal messaging platform. Seems that if Wickr was designed to replace Chime, Amazon wouldn't have rolled out Slack internally.

Ugh, they used chime for every meeting we did with them, so annoying.

Chime is a (crappy) zoom clone.

Our AWS account manager pushed us hard to use it for our checkins.

Chime has API to create your own client. We have used it to create Video Conference module for app.

AWS uses Slack Internally.

I think Chime is also used internally, and for virtual interviews.

It is. I spend about 2 hours a week arguing with AWS staff over chime. It’s quite decent.

Amazon allows people to use Slack internally. Chime is still at least the back end for all meetings. And in practice, because Chime chat is still supported, many managers tell their teams to always keep Chime open in case someone messages them there. There’s no way to tell who is on Slack vs on Chime.

In other words, Chime is to Amazon as Sametime is to IBM.

Sametime is/was great, it had all the functionality teams/Skype/slack are still working on implementing. It was just tied to a dying email client.

There is no difference, Slack itself tied up with AWS to use chime for their own voice/video calling [1]

[1] https://www.theverge.com/2020/6/4/21280829/slack-amazon-aws-...

I feel like every company is like this, keep slack and gchat open at my work...

For chat yes, but not for video calls (and like others pointed out, some still avoid Slack depending on the user. Devs seem to universally use Slack thankfully)

Lol. Slack uses Chime SDK for voice/video calls [1]. That is partly why Amazon uses Slack in the first place.

[1] https://www.theverge.com/2020/6/4/21280829/slack-amazon-aws-...

Which is amazing because Slack calls are so bad that they pushed us to pay for Zoom licensing. It can bring a brand new $2k laptop to a sputtering halt. Which is bad but honestly fine for meetings. Where it lost us was that we couldn’t use it for pair/group work because our tools would become so slow as to be unusable.

My guess is they got a pretty good deal on Voice/Video from AWS, or perhaps a better deal for entire AWS infra.

Kind of sad as video is a extra paid feature!. It is very limited in functionality, no screen share or view on mobile, no easy way to do audio/phone bridge.

The connections or bad that my org disabled audio/video calling on slack and encourage users to use Teams only.

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