4 new features to make meetings better in the new year

A very Happy New Year to you! As we ring in 2023, we can’t wait to share new features to help you stay connected, enhance productivity, and create engaging experiences. 

Whether you’re building your own personal avatar, simplifying your meetings with meeting templates, or creating a space for learning with Q&A in meetings, we’re so excited to see how you use these features. 

Here’s a quick breakdown of the new features available: 

To make meetings more flexible and fun, we’re adding avatars to our collection of filters. In addition to the animal avatars we released earlier last year, avatars are customizable virtual characters that you can create and use in your meetings. With numerous personalization combinations, you can display the ‘virtual you’ in a way that is original and fun! 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.

Avatars are great for when you:

• Don’t want to be seen eating but still want to show that you’re present and engaged
• Want to present more dynamically than an off-camera static profile picture
• Are looking for fun activities for employee onboarding, team bonding exercises, and previously mundane meetings 

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 customization options when creating your human avatar. 

We all know that not every meeting is the same — whether you’re meeting with clients, designing products, or conducting a team-building exercise, different types of meetings require different settings. 

But going through the process of adjusting your settings for each different meeting type can be time consuming. To help simplify that process, you can now create, save, and choose from custom meeting templates, which automatically apply the right settings for your needs. 

To make things even easier, we’ve provided three out-of-the-box meeting templates to get you started, including: 

• Large Meetings: Perfect for team-wide meetings or town halls where automated captions are enabled for all participants, and content is automatically recorded for future reference.
• Seminars: Ideal for corporate trainings or higher education classrooms, where tighter crowd control is needed so settings like participant screen sharing are disabled.
• K-12: Suited 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.

Whether you’re using one of these new default meeting templates we’ve provided, or customizing your own, using Meeting Templates will help you feel comfortable knowing you’ve got the right type of meeting scheduled, focus on your content, rather than spend time toggling settings. 

The in-meeting chat is a crucial resource for sharing information, resources, and comments during your Zoom Meetings. To enhance the in-meeting chat experience, later this month we’ll be releasing threaded messages and reactions, which allow meeting participants to create messages threads and consolidate emoji reactions in the in-meeting chat. This helps organize the chat messages and clarify which messages participants are responding to.  

The Q&A feature in Zoom Webinars is great for helping you engage with your webinar attendees. Now you can enjoy that same functionality in your meetings as well. The Q&A feature allows meeting hosts to stay more organized by having one place to view and answer questions. 

Now you won’t have to sift through meeting chats to make sure you’ve answered all of the questions. From the Q&A pop-out, hosts and co-hosts can view, answer, or dismiss questions. 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. 

Want to learn more about the recent updates to our platform? Be sure to visit our release notes page, where you can learn about all of the new features that have been released, or subscribe to our blog for updates like this.