Zoom Announces New 'AI Companion' Features

Sep 6: Zoom announced updates Tuesday to its generative artificial intelligence tool, which it's now calling Zoom AI Companion, that will "significantly expand" its capabilities beginning this fall. AI Companion will be available at no additional cost if you already pay for the video-meeting service. 

The company said that customers can expect to see the AI tool throughout Zoom, including in Team Chat, Meetings, Phone, Email, Whiteboard and "additional features on the roadmap." Some features will be available immediately, while others will launch over the coming months, according to Zoom's announcement.

Arguably Zoom's most well-known feature is video chatting for work meetings. One of Zoom AI Companion's new capabilities allows for you to quickly catch up if you're late to a Zoom meeting by asking questions through a side panel. Post-meeting, you can get Zoom recordings with highlights and smart chapters broken out, as well as auto-generated meeting summaries (as long as the meeting's host enables these features). By this spring, Zoom says its AI tool will be able to provide "real-time feedback" on its perception of your performance in meetings, as well as coaching you on conversation and presenting skills.

Zoom says it uses its own large language models as well as Meta's Llama 2, OpenAI and Anthropic to power its AI feature. Large language models are what power generative AI chatbots, like OpenAI's ChatGPT, Google's Bard and Microsoft's Bing. 

Other updates for Zoom include generative AI summarization for Team Chat, which will launch in the coming weeks and help you catch up on long chat threads. By early 2024, you'll be able to auto-complete sentences and schedule meetings from a chat. Other features for meeting preparations, debriefing and more will also be added.

AI Companion is turned off by default, Zoom said Tuesday, and whoever controls the account will be in charge of enabling them. The company also said that it does not use customer audio, video or other material to train its AI. This follows concerns over Zoom "slurping" data for its AI tools.

(CNET)