Zoom announces four new features to its meeting app; details inside

Video-conferencing platform Zoom is rolling out four new features for its users to make video calls better. These include the ability to set personal avatars, meeting templates, creating space for Q&A during meetings, and more. Let’s check out the features in detail.

Zoom personal avatars:

Announcing the new feature on its blog, Zoom said that the avatars feature would make meetings more flexible and fun. In addition to the animal avatars, Zoom users will now be able to set customizable virtual characters – avatars for their accounts. Added to the collection of filters, these virtual avatars can be used in meetings. Zoom says that avatars mirror the users’ movements and facial expressions, allowing them to present themselves dynamically without needing to be on video and providing a more engaging alternative to static profile pictures to inject more fun and energy into your meetings.

As per the blog, Avatars are great for when you:

• Don’t want to be seen eating but still want to show that you’re present and engaged.
• Want to present more dynamically than an off-camera static profile picture.
• Are looking for fun activities for employee onboarding, team bonding exercises, and previously mundane meetings.

Avatars are currently available in beta to all Zoom users globally. As it progresses in beta, we will continue to expand with additional facial features, hairstyles, and more customization options when creating your human avatar.

Meeting templates:

With Meeting templates, users can now create, save, and choose from custom meeting templates, which automatically apply the right settings for their needs.

“Using Meeting Templates will help you feel comfortable knowing you’ve got the right type of meeting scheduled, focus on your content, rather than spend time toggling settings,” said the blog post.

To make things even easier, Zoom provided three out-of-the-box meeting templates to get you started, including:

Large Meetings: Perfect for team-wide meetings or town halls where automated captions are enabled for all participants and content is automatically recorded for future reference.

Seminars: Ideal for corporate trainings or higher education classrooms, where tighter crowd control is needed so settings like participant screen sharing are disabled.

K-12: Suited for K-12 classrooms where advanced polls and quizzes are enabled to foster greater student engagement and productivity while limiting features that could be a distraction.

Threaded messages and reactions in in-meeting chat:

Threaded messages and reactions are aimed to enhance the in-meeting chat experience. It will allow meeting participants to create messages threads and consolidate emoji reactions in the in-meeting chat. This also helps organize the chat messages and clarify which messages participants are responding to.

Q&A in meetings:

Currently available to Zoom Webinars, the Q&A feature is now rolling out to meetings. The Q&A feature allows meeting hosts to stay more organized by having one place to view and answer questions. From the Q&A pop-out, hosts and co-hosts can view, answer, or dismiss questions. Hosts will have the ability to determine if they’d like meeting participants to be able to view all questions, or only ones that have been answered.

Q&A in meetings is available in Zoom One Business, Zoom One Business Plus, Zoom One Enterprise, and Zoom One Enterprise Plus accounts.