Telegram is on a roll this month. After announcing not one, but two new web apps and significant updates to its mobile offerings, the company has now set its sights on Zoom, Slack, and co. Telegram CEO Pavel Durov has just announced that the company wants to add a "video dimension" to its voice chats in May, making it a powerful video-conferencing platform.

The new video chatting tools are supposed to be built on top of the existing group voice chats the company introduced at the end of last year. The video dimension should add a whole slew of new and exciting capabilities to the chat app, including "screen sharing, encryption, noise-cancellation, desktop and tablet support – everything you can expect from a modern video conferencing tool." Durov even went as far as including a teaser of how the feature will look like on iOS:

The Telegram CEO additionally announced that the company would bring regular group video calls and 1:1 video conversations to its two redesigned web apps introduced earlier this month. He wrote, "To make them 100% complete in features, we are currently testing a functional version of web-based video calls internally, which will be added soon." In contrast to the new video conferencing tools, regular video calls have been part of Telegram's native apps since August 2020, making clear that Telegram was pretty late to that party. But it looks like the chat app is bound to overtake the competition from WhatsApp, Messenger, and Signal when it comes to functionality, ready to take on Zoom.

If you ask me, I wouldn't be surprised if Telegram ended up asking for money for some of these video-focused capabilities. After all, the company announced last year that it planned on monetizing its platform using premium features and advertisements, and this video-conferencing stuff sure looks premium to me.