Zoom, the video conference platform everyone turned to at the beginning of last year (sorry, Skype) has had a bumper 18 months. This week it kicked off its ‘Zoomtopia’ conference turned virtual workspace, where it unveiled a healthy handful of new features and updates to make your hybrid work experience more bearable. Here are some of the more notable ones.
Video Engagement Center (VEC)
With the world the way it is right now, face-to-face interaction between businesses and customers has become a bit of a novelty. It’s also made customer service a bit trickier to navigate. The Video Engagement Center will be an “easy-to-use, cloud-based solution that enables experts and end customers to connect over video.”
Effectively, it digitises face-to-face interactions between organisation experts and end-users, for those problems and queries that can’t be addressed over email or a game of broken telephone. Zoom says that face-to-virtual-face interaction will build customer trust, make it easier to help them, and also make for “unique digital experiences to customers from physical locations like a brick-and-mortar store or digital experiences like a website or application.”
Naturally, application of it will vary from business to business, but we can see this being pretty useful for things like IT support.
A whiteboard
Collaboration among colleagues is vital in modern workspaces, and a whiteboard is an unassuming but hugely useful collaborative tool. Zoom is creating a digital whiteboard for its workspace. Colleagues can create multiple whiteboards and access them from the web, desktop app, in a meeting, and in a Room on a tablet or mobile device. There, they can contribute to to-do lists, work logs, discussions, mind-maps, and so on.
“We envision that Zoom Whiteboard will act as a digital canvas, enabling seamless, real-time and asynchronous collaboration, with the ability to interact with the whiteboard similar to an in-person experience, creating more visually engaging and efficient meeting experiences,” says Zoom.
Zoom teams up with Oculus and Facebook
When Facebook announced its plans for Horizon Workrooms, a VR collaboration platform, we said, “It still sounds like Zoom with extra steps”. Well, we were more on the money with that than we knew because, as it turns out, Zoom will have a hand in Horizon Workroom’s development.
Effectively, Horizon Workroom users will be able to access some of the virtual workplace’s features, such as Whiteboard and Meetings, from their virtual workrooms, so it’s basically like VR Zoom. These features will be available with Horizon Workrooms when it arrives next year sometime.
Transcription and translation
Live captions are making waves as more and more platforms adopt them as part of their push for accessibility. Zoom has inclusion in mind too, and so is updating its live transcription feature and rolling out a live translation feature too. Live captions are paramount to the inclusion of those with hearing impairments, and live translation bridges the gaps created by language barriers. Live translation will be available in 12 languages, and automated transcription in 30 later next year.
Security updates
The virtual collaboration platform is developing a Bring Your Own Key (BYOK) encryption offering that should be getting a beta sometime later this year. In addition to the platform’s own encryption services, customers will also be responsible for encryption key management systems, where customers will hold a master decryption key that Zoom can’t see or use. “Zoom will interact with the customer’s KMS to obtain data keys for encryption and decryption and will use these data keys to encrypt and decrypt customer assets before those assets are written to long-term storage.”
Furthermore, Zoom is expanding its end-end encryption service to its mobile app, making one-on-one calls via the Zoom client safer and more secure.