Zoom brings four new features to make video calls better – Times of India

It is 2023 and video conferencing and calls are still very much a part of professionals’ lives. Video calling platform Zoom, which attained massive popularity in the last couple of years, has rolled out new features for its users for a better calling experience.
Add avatars to your profile
David Ball, product marketing manager, meetings and chat, Zoom, said that to make meetings more flexible and fun, Zoom is adding avatars to its collection of filters. Earlier last year, Zoom released animal avatars, which are customisable virtual characters that you can create and use in your meetings. “Avatars mirror your movements and facial expressions, allowing you to present yourself 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,” said Ball in a blog post. 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 customisation options when creating your human avatar,” said Ball.

New meeting templates

Zoom is adding new templates for meetings for different user needs. These include “Large Meetings”, “Seminars” and “K-12”. Large Meetings are meant for town halls where automated captions are enabled for all participants, and content is automatically recorded for future reference. Seminars, as per Ball, are ideal for corporate training or higher education classrooms, where tighter crowd control is needed so settings like participant screen sharing are disabled. K-12 is 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.”

Message threads, reactions to in-meeting chats

Like most platforms, reactions are now coming to Zoom as well. So are threaded messages. Ball says that this will allow meeting participants to create message threads and consolidate emoji reactions in the in-meeting chat. “This helps organize the chat messages and clarify which messages participants are responding to,” he said.

Q&A feature

Earlier, Zoom had the Q&A feature restricted to its Webinars only. Now, it is being rolled out for Meetings as well. 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.