Johannesburg - The video conferencing app, which forced you to join that work meeting you were trying to avoid, has announced new features, the most exciting of which is its gesture recognition function.
One of the few companies to actually benefit from global lockdowns brought on by the Covid-19 pandemic, Zoom, has announced a lineup of new features.
These features include Gesture Recognition, Zoom IQ for Sales teams, Zoom Whiteboard, and a ‘Backstage’ for Zoom Events.
While allowing your boss to see your bedroom, Zoom’s Gesture Recognition feature now attempts to ‘keep cameras on’ by recognising users’ physical gestures, such as a raised hand, to display a corresponding meeting reaction, already offered by the click of a button.
The gesture recognition feature is also expected to support ‘Raise Hand’ and ‘Thumbs Up’ reactions in the client version 5.10.3 or higher across the account, group, or user levels.
The feature will make interactions a lot more natural in meetings, without you having to press a button to express an emotion.
Fortunately for employees who are allowed more privacy, the setting is disabled at the client level by default.
Despite this, Zoom aims to remain relevant with IQ for Sales, which aims to support sales teams with a conversation AI solution to analyse customer interactions to offer insights, actions, and content from sales meetings.
Further dampening the joys of working from home, Zoom’s new Whiteboard will offer cross-platform and visual collaboration and even more unnecessary features like shapes, connectors, sticky notes, adding images, etc.
Meanwhile, giving credit where it’s due, Zoom is allowing artists and concert-goers alike an opportunity for better live events with its Backstage feature.
Backstage aims to offer a space for event panellists and staff to communicate behind the scenes before, during, and after a Zoom… thing…
However, that’s not all.
Further entrenching itself as a tool to create a permanent social distance between you and your coworkers, the platform announced the availability of Zoom Contact Center, Zoom Chat and Zoom Phone, among other WhatsApp features.
Statista, a company providing market and consumer data, reported that in the first quarter of this year, Zoom surpassed $1bn, from being valued at less than $100m two years prior.
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