Zoom is launching photorealistic AI avatars that can attend meetings on your behalf, allowing users to appear polished even when they’re not “camera-ready.” The feature, rolling out to Workplace users in December, represents a significant step toward CEO Eric Yuan’s vision of digital twins that can handle tasks like meetings and emails autonomously.
How it works: Users can create AI avatars by uploading or capturing photos directly in the app, then customize them with professional outfits.
• The avatar tracks your real-time movements and speech during meetings, creating a lifelike representation even if you just rolled out of bed.
• This builds on Zoom’s existing feature that lets users send prerecorded messages with AI avatars, but now extends to live meeting participation.
Built-in safeguards: Zoom plans to implement authentication measures to prevent avatar misuse and ensure transparency.
• The platform will use “live camera authentication” to verify that users are uploading legitimate photos of themselves, preventing people from attending meetings as celebrities like Keanu Reeves.
• Meeting participants will see “in-meeting tile notices” indicating when someone is using an AI avatar.
• “This feature remains in development, and specific enrollment and authentication processes may change before general availability,” said Smita Hashim, Zoom’s chief product officer.
The bigger vision: This launch moves Zoom closer to CEO Eric Yuan’s concept of comprehensive digital twins.
• During a June 2024 interview, Yuan described a future where AI agents use your likeness to make decisions and perform tasks on your behalf.
• The technology could eventually handle routine meetings and automatically respond to emails without human intervention.
Additional December updates: Zoom is also launching real-time voice translation and expanding its AI assistant capabilities.
• The translation feature will convert speech in real-time across nine languages: English, German, Chinese, French, Spanish, Arabic, Japanese, Portuguese, and Italian.
• An updated AI assistant will be able to schedule meetings, create video clips, and take notes during in-person meetings on other platforms like Microsoft Teams and Google Meet.
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