Zoom Introduces AI Avatars to Communicate on Your Behalf with Your Team

Zoom is moving closer to offering AI avatars that can represent you in meetings. As part of its AI expansion, Zoom will soon allow users to create a digital avatar that can send brief messages to colleagues.

To create your avatar, you’ll need to record an initial video. Zoom's AI will use this footage to generate an avatar that looks and sounds like you. Once your avatar is set up, you can compose a message for it to deliver, freeing you up to focus on other tasks. This feature will function with Zoom’s Clips feature, enabling you to record short video updates.

Addressing concerns about deepfakes, Smita Hashim, Zoom’s chief product officer, emphasized the company's commitment to security through advanced authentication, watermarking technology, and strict usage policies.

The custom AI avatars will launch early next year as part of Zoom’s AI Companion add-on, which will be available for an additional $12 per month. For those without the add-on but with a paid Zoom subscription, preset AI avatars and voices will still be accessible for creating clips.

In a recent interview, Zoom CEO Eric Yuan expressed his vision of allowing users to send a "digital twin" to meetings. He stated, “Ideally, I do not need to join. I can send a digital version of myself... so I can go to the beach.” He stressed the importance of leveraging AI to automate tasks within the Zoom Workplace.

In addition to AI avatars, the upcoming custom add-on will facilitate integration with third-party productivity apps like Zendesk and Asana, and it will introduce new personalization options for custom meeting summary templates.