Zoom’s avatars now let you appear as a cartoon version of yourself

Zoom today announced the creation of human avatars for its video-meeting app. Like Apple’s Memoji Or the cartoons of the humanoid. Mark Zuckerberg wants us to use In the metaverse, customizable virtual characters can mirror your facial expressions and movements. This allows you to bring a sense of zaniness to less formal meetings.

The human avatars follow Zoom’s release of animal avatars This was earlier in the year. The company suggests using avatars when you are eating, don’t want to use a static profile pic or feel like livening up the mundane. Beta testers can access the feature, but they will need to have a paid account. Zoom claims that the beta will bring new facial features and hairstyles to its users.

Zoom also offers templates that can be used as shortcuts to different meeting types. You can choose from three presets or create your own templates. These include large meetings with automatically recorded captions and automatically recording content, seminars (tighter crowd control settings with screen-sharing disabled), and K-12 (enabled quizzes and polls while limiting distracting elements). Learn how to make templates here these instructions.

In-meeting chats will soon be able to use threaded messages and responses. Similar to what you’d see in Slack, Facebook Messenger or iMessage, message threads make it easier to figure out which message someone is replying to. Emoji reactions can be used to tidy up the chat and link the reply with the original message. Zoom claims that threads and emoji responses will be available later in the month.

Finally, Zoom is adding Q&A in meetings. Meeting hosts can use the Q&A pop-out to help them stay organized and limit group questions to a specific area of Zoom. The Q&A pop-out lets meeting hosts view, answer or dismiss queries. They can also decide whether all or only the answers will be displayed to participants. To make the feature available, hosts will need a premium subscription.