Zoom held its annual Zoomtoopia conference today, providing a glimpse at some of the features it’s working on bringing to its video conferencing software. There are almost too many enhancements to count, but some of the more notable ones have the potential to change how you use the service.
The first of those is an expansion of Zoom's automated closed captioning system. At the start of the year, Zoom announced it was making the feature available to all of its users by the fall of 2021. Now, the company plans to make it work in a total of 30 languages. It’s also adding live translation support for 12 languages. Both expansions will occur over the next year and come after the company bought a startup that specializes in real-time translation.
Zoom is also working on an expanded Whiteboard experience that will make the feature available on the web and outside of meetings and calls. To that end, you’ll find a separate Whiteboard tab once the experience rolls out in beta later this year. Then, sometime next year, Zoom plans to work with Facebook to bring its video conferencing software and Whiteboard feature to the company’s Horizon Workrooms to allow you to access them both in virtual reality.
Zoom is also working on several smaller but still notable features. For instance, support for end-to-end encryption is coming to Zoom Phone, which will allow you to keep phone calls you make over Zoom secure. Check out the company’s blog post to see everything it’s working on at the moment.