Zoom unveils real-time voice translation, deepfake detection features for video calls

Zoom announced on Tuesday, March 10, that it is bringing real-time audio translation to Zoom Meetings, allowing users to understand speakers in different languages during calls. The video communications platform also unveiled a new feature aimed at detecting synthetic audio or video in Zoom Meetings.

The new features coming to Zoom Meetings are among a handful of new AI-powered capabilities coming to Zoom’s enterprise-grade offerings, including Zoom Workplace, Zoom Phone, and Zoom CX.

The live voice translation feature will let Zoom users speak in their native language while others on the call can hear the translated speech in their preferred language in real-time. The feature is currently available in five languages, with support for more languages coming soon.

Zoom first gained widespread recognition during the COVID-19 pandemic, when remote work and virtual meetings became the norm. Since then, the company has looked to become more than a video conferencing platform by launching AI-powered productivity tools and customer support products for enterprises. It has sought to define its competitive edge in the crowded AI industry by taking a federated approach where multiple AI models, including Zoom’s own models and those from OpenAI, Anthropic, and Meta, are dynamically selected to provide cost-effective solutions.

The company’s new on-call deepfake risk detection feature arrives as AI-driven online scams continue to surge. It could play a key role in protecting users from ‘digital arrest’ scams, many of which rely on deceptive video calls to trick victims.

“The next phase of enterprise AI will be defined by the ability to move from conversation to action. Zoom’s agentic AI platform is designed to orchestrate action across systems, turning every meeting, call, and customer interaction into a trigger for workflow automation,” said Velchamy Sankarlingam, president of Product & Engineering at Zoom.

Alongside these Zoom Meeting features, the company also introduced a suite of AI-powered office apps such as AI Docs, Slides, and Sheets that can be used to generate document drafts, spreadsheets with data, or presentations based on meeting transcripts and data from other services.

Zoom further said that AI avatars, announced last year, will start becoming available to users later this month. The feature lets users create photo-realistic, AI-generated avatars of themselves to appear in online meetings on their behalf. Zoom’s AI Companion 3.0, its latest AI assistant on the web unveiled last year, will soon be accessible through a desktop app. The AI assistant is also being integrated across the Zoom Workplace app, Zoom Business Services, and Workvivo, its app for employee communication.

In addition, AI Companion 3.0 can be integrated with third-party platforms such as Slack, ServiceNow, Box, Google Drive, and OneDrive, enabling the AI assistant to synthesise enterprise data across applications and provide insights from multiple data sources.

Amid the rising popularity of AI agents, Zoom is letting users create and deploy custom as well as pre-built AI agents through no-code, natural language prompts. These custom AI agents can act on users’ behalf to automate workflows across third-party systems such as Salesforce, Slack, and ServiceNow, the company said.

For developers, Zoom announced a new suite of enterprise‑grade AI APIs which can be used to build apps that leverage the transcription, translation, summarization, deep reasoning, and image‑processing technologies powering Zoom’s own products.

In Zoom Phone, the company is rolling out agentic workflows that help enterprise clients automatically execute tasks such as drafting emails or sending out summaries. It is also adding new SMS capabilities for the 24/7 virtual receptionist to handle customer engagements via text, answer questions, collect information, support scheduling flows, and escalate to a human when needed.

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