Enabling or disabling gesture recognition

Admins can allow participants to give more visible feedback through gestures by using gesture recognition. This feature translates a real-world gesture into Zoom’s existing reactions, allowing for visual gestures, such as a raised hand, to automatically display a corresponding meeting reaction and allow users to more easily react during a meeting or webinar. Currently, this feature is supported for Raise Hand ✋ and Thumbs Up 👍 reactions.

Account owners and admins can enable or disable, as well as lock, this feature at the account level. By default, gesture recognition is disabled at the account and group levels but enabled for accounts that have meeting reactions and webinar reactions turned on.

Users will still need to enable this in the Zoom desktop app or mobile app settings. 

Note: Apple also supports video effects using gestures on macOS Sonoma 14 and iOS 17. Depending on your macOS or iOS settings, these video effects may appear in your Zoom meetings, but are not controlled by Zoom. Learn how to disable these features through macOS settings. 

Prerequisites for enabling or disabling gesture recognition

How to enable or disable gesture recognition

Account

To enable or disable gesture recognition for all users in the account:

  1. Sign in to the Zoom web portal as an admin with the privilege to edit account settings.
  2. In the navigation menu, click Account Management then Account Settings.
  3. Click the Meeting tab.
  4. Under In Meeting (Basic), click the Gesture Recognition toggle to enable or disable it.
  5. If a verification dialog displays, click Enable or Disable to verify the change.
  6. (Optional) To prevent all users in your account from changing this setting, click the lock unlocked-button.png icon, and then click Lock to confirm the setting.

Group

To enable or disable gesture recognition for a group of users:

  1. Sign in to the Zoom web portal as an admin with the privilege to edit groups.
  2. In the navigation menu, click User Management then Group Management.
  3. Click the applicable group name from the list.
  4. Click the Meeting tab.
  5. Under In Meeting (Basic), click the Gesture Recognition toggle to enable or disable it.
  6. If a verification dialog displays, click Enable or Disable to verify the change.
    Note: If the option is grayed out, it has been locked at the account level and needs to be changed at that level.