At Zoomtopia 2025, Zoom unveiled AI Companion 3.0, its latest expansion of AI into Zoom Workplace.
Among lifelike AI avatars capable of creating personalized videos in multiple languages, proactive meeting prep, and writing assistants, one capability stood out: real-time voice translation.
Arriving in December 2025, the new feature will allow meeting participants to hear speech in their preferred language.
For the first time, Zoom users will experience more seamless speech-to-speech translation built into the platform — a step beyond its existing AI live translated captions, human interpreter channels, and even the external speech translation apps integrated in Zoom’s ecosystem that have until now filled this gap.
Until now, Zoom’s multilingual toolkit revolved around two options: AI live translated captions — real-time text translation of spoken language into captions in up to 46 languages — and language interpretation, where human interpreters are assigned to parallel audio channels.
What Zoom had not offered was built-in, real-time AI speech-to-speech translation, leaving that space to external language technology platforms and language solution integrators. With this release, Zoom is bringing that capability in-house.
Zoom describes the feature as a way to “reduce interpreter costs and facilitate collaboration with global colleagues and partners.”
The announcement also comes as rivals Microsoft, Google, and Apple preview or roll out their own speech-to-speech translation features.
Industry experts highlight the significance. Interpreting industry veteran Claudio Fantinuoli noted: “With Google, Apple, Microsoft, and many others launching similar features, real-time translation is becoming ubiquitous at remarkable speed.”
He frames this as part of 2025 being “the year machine interpreting went mainstream,” bringing both opportunities and risks for traditional interpreting services.
Analysts at UC Today suggested that translation may prove to be “the most genuinely useful feature of all” — even if lifelike AI avatars and AI productivity tools grabbed more headlines.
Beyond real-time voice translation, Zoom is also promising features such as AI that can polish transcripts and voice dictation into professional-sounding text, as well as improved transcription accuracy for accented speakers. According to Zoom, AI Companion 3.0 will be available with eligible paid Zoom Workplace plans, though availability may vary by region or industry vertical.
