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Zoom Video Communications intends to offer office staff the ability to communicate with colleagues the exhaust of an AI lookalike that speaks from a script the exhaust of a lip-synced, cloned suppose.
“Imagine being able to create video clips for demos or training sessions using just a text script, featuring a digital avatar that looks and sounds like you – no retakes needed,” mused chief product officer Smita Hashim in a weblog submit on Wednesday.
Whether coworkers will appreciate being addressed in this way is another matter.
Along side the Zoomtopia 2024 conference, the comms biz talked up its Zoom AI Companion 2.0, a generative AI assistant (beforehand Zoom IQ) that works across the Zoom platform.
Available in the coming weeks for paid customers of the Zoom Workplace productiveness suite at no additional value, the latest iteration of the company’s generative AI service takes the earn of a aspect panel enter menu in the Zoom Workplace app.
Instead of clicking on icons and manipulating apps as individuals have done for the past four decades, AI Companion affords a way to exhaust natural language to suppose the underlying chatbot model to produce these tasks.
An example cited at some point of the conference showed an employee named “Craig” typing: “Schedule a meeting to discuss the global strategy plan and rollout at 10:00 with all channel members.” Zoom’s AI Companion spoke back by creating a assembly invite button for the Team Chat channel and suggesting a assembly agenda.
AI Companion can also carry out issues admire summarize conferences, which calls into question the want to attend at all.
Zoom Workplace has various other capabilities apart from Team Chat, including Calendar, Doctors, Tasks, Cellphone, and Clips.
Launched last year, Zoom Clips affords a way to file short video clips for asynchronous communication. Instead of emailing coworkers, Zoom Workplace users can field colleagues to prepared videos – for these occasions when making a personal effort to communicate is correct too necessary.
At some point subsequent year, users will have the option to purchase, for an additional $12 per user per 30 days, an add-on to AI Companion that expands the apps accessible to Zoom’s AI beyond the calendar and email services and products of Microsoft and Google to encompass Atlassian (Jira & Confluence), Glean, Workday, Zendesk, ServiceNow, Box, Asana, and Hubspot, among others.
As part of this add-on, users of Zoom Clips will probably be able to create and send video clips containing a photorealistic digital simulacrum that speaks in a digital, soundalike suppose from a textual stammer material script.
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“The ability to use custom avatars for Zoom Clips is a new feature that will launch in the first half of 2025 as part of the custom AI Companion add-on,” a Zoom spokesperson told The Register. “Custom avatars for Zoom Clips will help people communicate asynchronously with their colleagues in a faster, more productive way, saving them precious time and effort recording clips by using a personalized AI-generated avatar to create clips with a transcript. Users will record a ‘seed video’ to create their personal avatar and the avatar video clip will sync with the audio generated from the transcript.”
Microsoft Azure is pondering along similar lines with an avatar generator that affords photorealistic avatars that speak in synthesized voices from textual stammer material scripts.
This capability is already displaying up in commercial products, as viewed in this video produced by Photo AI of an AI-generated woman posing as a CNN reporter – which, if distributed with the intent to deceive, would qualify as a deepfake.
Prototype works now
Achieve yourself anywhere in the world speaking about anything you want https://t.co/PoP3c6s3xh pic.twitter.com/w5ppC3FFsY— @levelsio (@levelsio) October 8, 2024
Regardless of ongoing efforts to restrict the potential harm of deepfakes, the US First Amendment guarantee of free speech poses a dispute for overly broad prohibitions on AI-created stammer material. In California earlier this month, a mediate temporarily blocked state law AB 2839, which prohibits the distribution of unfounded election-related deepfakes.
Zoom, for its part, insists its avatar service will probably be defended against abuse and that mechanisms admire watermarking will forestall videos from being helpful for deception – and thus being classified as deepfakes.
“We’ve built in numerous safeguards to help protect against misuse and will continue to review and add safeguards in the future,” the company’s spokesperson said. “We employ advanced authentication and watermarking technology to make it obvious when a clip is generated with an avatar, and strict usage policies to help ensure the integrity of avatar-generated content and prevent misuse or deepfake creation.” ®
