Zoom will let AI avatars talk to your team for you

Zoom is getting one step closer to letting AI avatars attend meetings for you. As part of a broader AI expansion, Zoom announced it will soon let you create an AI avatar of yourself that you can use to send brief messages to your team.

To create a digital avatar, you’ll need to record an initial video of yourself that Zoom’s AI will use to make an avatar that looks — and even sounds — like you. From there, you can write the message you want your AI avatar to say and then have it do all the talking for you. This feature will only work with Zoom’s Clips feature, allowing you to record brief video updates for your colleagues.

Zoom is taking the possibility of deepfakes into account. Smita Hashim, Zoom’s chief product officer, said during a press briefing that the company is “handling it really carefully with advanced authentication, with watermarking technology, and strict usage policies.”

The custom AI avatars are rolling out early next year as part of Zoom’s custom AI Companion add-on, which will cost an extra $12 per month. If you don’t have the add-on but do have a paid Zoom subscription, Zoom will still let you create clips using preset AI avatars and voices, which are probably equally as creepy as making AI avatars of yourself.

During an interview on Decoder in June, Zoom CEO Eric Yuan mentioned his goal of letting you send a “digital twin” to meetings and calls while you’re doing something else. “Today for this session, ideally, I do not need to join. I can send a digital version of myself to join so I can go to the beach,” Yuan said. “Or I do not need to check my emails; the digital version of myself can read most of the emails… How [do we] leverage AI, how do we leverage Zoom Workplace, to fully automate that kind of work? That’s something that is very important for us.”

Along with AI avatars, Zoom’s new custom add-on will allow its AI to integrate with more third-party productivity apps, like Zendesk and Asana, as well as introduce new personalization options that you can use to create custom meeting summary templates.