You can soon attend Zoom meetings as your AI avatar

Zoom’s vision of filling meetings with AI clones has nearly arrived. On Wednesday, the video conferencing app announced that you’ll soon be able to create a “photorealistic” avatar of yourself in case you aren’t “camera-ready.” That means your AI avatar can appear polished if you’ve just crawled out of bed.

Zoom plans on launching this feature to Workplace users in December, allowing you to generate an AI lookalike based on a photo of yourself that you upload or capture directly in the app. Once Zoom generates your avatar, you’ll be able to “dress” it in different professional outfits. It will track your movement during the meeting as you talk or move around your screen in real life.

While Zoom started letting users deliver prerecorded messages with an AI avatar last year, this takes things further by allowing you to pose as an AI clone in meetings. During an interview on Decoder in June 2024, Zoom CEO Eric Yuan hinted at a future where everyone has a “digital twin,” or an AI agent that uses your likeness to perform tasks and make decisions on your behalf, like attending meetings and automatically answering emails. Zoom may not be quite there yet, but it’s getting closer.

Zoom plans on rolling out some safeguards with its photorealistic avatars feature, which means you shouldn’t be able to attend your meetings as Keanu Reeves. Smita Hashim, Zoom’s chief product officer, tells The Verge that the platform will use “live camera authentication” to ensure that you’re the person in the image you’ve uploaded. Zoom will also include “in-meeting tile notices” that indicate you’re using an AI avatar. “This feature remains in development, and specific enrollment and authentication processes may change before general availability,” Hashim said.

Along with photorealistic AI avatars, Zoom is launching some other updates to the platform, including real-time voice translation. When the update is released in December, it will use AI to translate what a speaker is saying in real time, allowing participants to hear the speaker talk in the language of their choice. The feature currently supports English, German, Chinese, French, Spanish, Arabic, Japanese, Portuguese, and Italian.

Zoom is also releasing a new version of its AI assistant, which can do things like schedule meetings for you and create video clips. This month, Zoom will give users the ability to “bring” the assistant to in-person meetings and conferences on other platforms like Microsoft Teams and Google Meet, where it can take notes.