Zoom is making significant strides toward its objective of enabling AI avatars to attend meetings on behalf of users. As part of a comprehensive AI expansion strategy, Zoom has announced that users will soon have the capability to create personalized AI avatars to send brief messages to their teams.

To develop a digital avatar, users need to first record an initial video of themselves. Zoom’s artificial intelligence will utilize this footage to create an avatar that not only looks like the user but also mimics their voice. Users can then input messages they want their AI avatar to convey, effectively handling all communications on their behalf. This feature is exclusively available through Zoom’s Clips functionality, which allows recording short video updates for colleagues.

Zoom is also addressing concerns related to deepfakes. Smita Hashim, Zoom’s Chief Product Officer, stated during a press conference that the company is "handling this issue with great caution through advanced authentication, watermarking technologies, and stringent usage policies."

The customizable AI avatars are set to launch early next year as part of Zoom’s Custom AI Companion add-on, which will be available for an additional $12 per month. For users with a paid Zoom subscription who do not purchase the add-on, Zoom will still offer pre-set AI avatars and voices for creating video clips, which may be just as uncanny as self-created AI avatars.

In a June interview with Decoder, Zoom CEO Yuan Zheng discussed his vision of allowing users to send a “digital twin” to meetings and calls while they engage in other activities. “Ideally, I wouldn’t need to attend today’s meeting. I could send my digital version to represent me, allowing me to go to the beach,” Zheng said. “Or I wouldn’t need to check emails; my digital version could read most of them... How we leverage AI and Zoom Workplace to fully automate such tasks is very important to us.”

In addition to AI avatars, Zoom’s new Custom add-on will enable its AI to integrate with more third-party productivity applications like Zendesk and Asana, and introduce new personalization options that allow users to create custom meeting summary templates.