Zoom has released several big updates, and they come with many highly requested features to help organize and make meetings more immersive. We’ve selected the ones that will have big impacts on your class meetings to highlight.
Self enablement of automated captions.
Meeting and webinar participants can enable automated captions themselves through the in-meeting Show Captions button. Previously, participants needed to request captions be enabled.
Camera-off avatars
Virtual avatars can be enabled and animated based on user speech, even with video disabled. Avatars enable you to replace your appearance with a 3D virtual avatar that mirrors your head movements and facial expressions. Avatars are an easy and entertaining way to engage with your meeting attendees and add a bit of fun. Avatars also provide a good middle ground for users who don’t want to turn on their camera, but still want to leverage the power of body language and facial expressions.
Additional enhanced formatting for in-meeting chat
The in-meeting chat functionality has expanded to enable stronger communication and improve feature parity between in-meeting chat and Team Chat. Hosts can allow meeting participants to communicate as effectively and efficiently with in-meeting chat, as they do with Team Chat. Participants will be able to delete their messages, reply in threads, quote, format their messages with additional rich text formatting options, preview images directly in the chat thread, capture and send screenshots, and react to messages with emojis.
Create breakout rooms based on poll results
When the Allow host to create breakout rooms from poll results setting is enabled, hosts can choose to create breakout rooms based on the participants’ poll answers. For example, the meeting host may want to split breakout rooms based on participants who share similar interests.