Zoom Technologies has launched a new live voice translation service, with Arabic support coming in the fourth quarter of this year.
Five languages – English, Chinese, French, Japanese and Spanish – will initially be available, the California-based company said.
A Zoom representative confirmed to The National that Arabic will be available in the fourth quarter, alongside German, Italian and Portuguese.
Zoom launched a version of the service in April, after promoting it at its Zoomtopia conference last September.
Using the live voice translation feature requires a Pro, Business, or Enterprise account, the artificial intelligence plug-in ZoomMate, or a stand-alone add-on. Zoom has posted instructions on how to activate the service on its website.
Added features include voice cloning, which preserves the original speaker's voice characteristics, and translation projection, which allows people to speak in their own language and everyone else to hear it in theirs.
Zoom said the feature was designed to minimise distraction and add more focus when on calls.
“The core design principle here is simple: keep people in the conversation,” the company said. “Translated captions require you to split your attention between reading and listening. Voice translation lets you do what you'd do in any meeting – listen, react and respond naturally.”
Video conferencing exploded in popularity during the Covid pandemic of 2020, as people were confined to their homes and restricted from meeting face-to-face.
That offered companies such as Zoom a huge opportunity to tap into the market. In addition to offering a free tier, they have introduced paid tiers with more features.
Zoom has around 300 million daily active users and accounts for more than 55 per cent of the videoconferencing market, with the number of annual meeting minutes well over 3.3 trillion, according to data compiled by industry tracker DemandSage. The company reported revenue of more than $4.6 billion in 2025.
Competition has also heightened in the sector, as videoconferencing companies work to add AI features to enhance the user experience.
Zoom also stressed that live voice translation is secure, with no data from meetings stored.
“Voice translation processes audio in real time to deliver the feature. No meeting audio is stored, no voice prints are created and no persistent user profiles are built from translation data,” it said. “The feature processes what it needs for the meeting and discards it.”
