Zoom update with more emoji reactions and new annotation features

Zoom update this week, offers its users more features including a couple of quality of life improvements for anyone using its annotation or emoji reaction features.

Now, Meeting participants can use any emoji that was previously available in Zoom chat to react during a meeting. This certainly is an improvement from the six meagre options that were available previously. The new emojis include those with different skin colours. Hosts can also restrict emoji reactions to the standard six if they prefer, and for larger accounts, the full emoji set must be manually enabled by admins or account owners.

The service has also enhanced its annotation feature. An improvement from the old annotation feature where drawing text on the presentation screen would have to be erased before moving on. Now, a new “Vanishing Pen” tool on Windows, macOS, and Linux allows annotations to automatically disappear within “a couple of seconds.” If you’re drawing annotations on an Android or iOS tablet, there’s a new auto-shape feature to turn them into straight lines, rectangles, and ovals. Combined, these should keep Zoom presentations looking neater.

The service that’s celebrating its tenth anniversary, saw a boom in popularity around a year ago when the pandemic hit. It was, at the time, hard to talk about the service without mentioning the privacy and security issues that were plaguing it at the time. Its encryption wasn’t actually end-to-end, and its default settings led to a wave of so-called “Zoombombings.” But in the year since, the company has rolled out fix after fix for its biggest issues, and now here we are talking about new emoji reaction features.