Zoom will allow AI avatars to talk to your team for you

Zoom is one step closer to allowing AI avatars to participate in meetings for you. As part of its broader AI development, Zoom has announced that it will soon let you create your own AI avatar that you can utilize to send compact messages to your team.

To create a digital avatar, you’ll need to record an initial video of yourself, which Zoom’s AI will utilize to create an avatar that looks – and even sounds – like you. From there, you can write the message you want to convey to your AI avatar and then let it speak for you. This feature will only work with Zoom clip functionallowing you to record compact video updates for colleagues.

Zoom considers the possibility of deepfakes. Smita Hashim, Zoom’s chief product officer, said during the press conference that the company is “handling this very carefully, using advanced authentication, watermarking technology and strict usage policies.”

Custom AI avatars will be available early next year as part of Zoom’s custom AI Companion add-on, which will cost an additional $12 per month. If you don’t have the add-on but have a paid Zoom subscription, Zoom will still allow you to create clips using pre-made avatars and AI voices, which will likely be as scary as creating your own AI avatars.

During the interview on Decoder in June, Zoom CEO Eric Yuan mentioned his goal of allowing you to send a “digital twin” to meetings and calls while you do something else. “Ideally, I don’t need to join today’s session to participate in this session. I can send a digital version of myself so I can join and go to the beach,” Yuan said. “Or I don’t have to check email; the digital version of me can read most emails… Like [do we] use artificial intelligence, how to use Zoom Workplace to fully automate this type of work? This is something that is very important to us.”

In addition to AI avatars, Zoom’s up-to-date custom add-on will enable AI to integrate with more third-party productivity apps like Zendesk and Asana, and will also introduce up-to-date personalization options that can be used to create custom meeting summary templates.