Zoom Now Launches Avatar Feature for Instagram-Like Meetings

Avatar filter display on Zoom (photo: Zoom)

JAKARTA - Entering 2023, Zoom shares four new features to help you stay connected, increase productivity, and create an engaging video call experience.

The first is that Zoom added Avatar to its filter collection. In addition to the animal avatars that were released early last year, the avatars that are now being released are virtual characters that you can customize yourself.

Similar to the avatars released by Meta, Zoom avatars also feature various personalization combinations. The avatar will always follow your movements and facial expressions.

The Avatar filter is currently available in beta for all Zoom users globally. As the beta progresses, Zoom will also expand additional facial features, hairstyles, and more customization options when creating your human avatar.

The second feature released is Meeting Templates, which can be customized to suit your settings for each different type of meeting that can take a long time. To make things easier, Zoom provides three ready-to-use meeting templates, including:

• Large Meetings: For whole team meetings, where live captions can be turned on for all participants, and content is automatically recorded for future reference.
• Seminars: For training or classrooms, where stricter crowd control is required so settings such as participant screen sharing are disabled.
• K-12: Perfect for classrooms where advanced polls and quizzes are enabled to encourage student engagement and productivity while limiting distracting features.

The third feature that was rolled out next is messages and replies in chat in meetings. This feature allows meeting participants to create message threads and incorporate emoji reactions in the in-meeting chat. This helps organize chat messages and clarify which messages participants respond to.

The last feature is the Q&A feature in meetings. Initially this feature only appeared in Zoom Webinars, but now Q&A is also present in meetings. The Q&A feature allows meeting organizers to stay more organized by having one place to view and answer questions.

In-meeting Q&A is now available on Zoom One Business, Zoom One Business Plus, Zoom One Enterprise, and Zoom One Enterprise Plus accounts.