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, which became a lifeline for remote workers during the pandemic, says it has a clear rationale for why it’s calling some workers back to the office twice a week: To build collaborative products for the new ways of working, employees need to experience the pain firsthand.
Video calling was originally pitched as a key feature of the Nest Hub Max, but Google Meet and Zoom are dropping support at the end of September. It feels way too soon to be removing key functionality from the Max.
Zoom has updated its terms of service after a backlash over fears that it trained its artificial intelligence (AI) models on customer calls. Talking to the BBC, before the terms of service were updated, data protection specialist Robert Bateman said: "The terms appeared to give the service provider a lot of freedom to use data generated by its users for many different purposes." He said that while there was a question mark over the risks that could arise, "alarm bells should ring when you encounter broad contractual provisions like these".
Walia merely says “this will be available on all new Tesla models soon.” She also teased the integration will be designed to sync with the rest of your Zoom account.
“Soon, you’ll be able to hop over from your car, your desk, or wherever you are into a Zoom room, and seamlessly transfer your meetings, your whiteboard, your Zoom applications with you to the room,” Walia adds.
On Monday, Zoom announced a small change to the name of the product — it’s now called Zoom Team Chat — alongside a handful of other handy updates coming to the collaboration software.
