Zoom has been ramping up its features over the past year to better accommodate larger events and different types of meetings. As in-person events return and the pandemic event tech boom comes to an end, many planners are finding that Zoom now offers enough functionality for their virtual event needs.
Last year, Zoom introduced its Zoom Apps program, which allows for integrations with popular workflow and social apps such as Asana and Dropbox to improve collaboration and engagement at meetings and social gatherings. There are now more than 100 apps published on Zoom apps, and the program was recently opened to all developers with the launch of Zoom Apps SDK last month.
During its recent Work Transformation Summit, the company announced two new updates: Zoom Apps for Webinars, and Immersive Experiences. Zoom Apps for Webinars is what it sounds like — select apps are now available to access in Webinars, which will help elevate these more basic meeting types.
The available apps include Applause Studio, which allows the audience to provide live reactions to event content such as hearts and GIFs, and Pigeonhole Live, which enables hosts to engage attendees with basic but useful features like Q&A and word clouds and captures related engagement insights for organizers. In addition, the Wordly app offers immense value by enabling live translation, including audio, captions, and transcripts, for webinars on Zoom.
Zoom is also bolstering its platform with new immersive features that allow hosts to customize virtual backgrounds and foregrounds. More basic apps like Warmly allow participants to include customized logos or memes on their backgrounds and react with GIFs.
Events can also leverage a more immersive view with Welo, which merges attendee videos into a collaborative virtual space that attendees can move around in via avatars.
Now that Zoom Apps is open to all developers, there will be many more apps and experiences to come. While not native to the Zoom platform, the app program allows users to create and utilize a variety of different features and experiences, which make the platform fun and potentially more appealing to meeting and event planners.