Zoom will offer users an AI assistant that can tap large language models from companies including OpenAI to summarize your video meetings and compose chat messages for you.
AI Companion is a free perk for paid Zoom users. The video-conferencing app previously teased a generative AI program called Zoom IQ, which it was planning on offering to select customers through a free trial.
The company now sees an opportunity to enhance Zoom by making the AI assistant a core feature for the app—if you pay. “We are transcending the hype in generative AI by delivering tangible products and disrupting the industry’s pricing model,” Zoom Chief Product Officer Smita Hashim said in the announcement.
The company published a video showing off the AI companion’s various features. As you can see, the assistant can create a summary of a meeting you missed or joined late.
“If enabled by the meeting host, attendees can catch up quickly without disrupting the meeting flow by discreetly submitting questions via the in-meeting AI Companion side panel to receive an AI-generated answer on what they missed,” Zoom added. “Postmeeting, hosts can receive an automated meeting summary to share with attendees and those who were unable to attend a meeting.”
In addition, the AI companion can help a user quickly draft messages based on a chat thread. The user can then change the tone or length of the draft message with a click of a button. The same function can also summarize a long chat thread.
“Zoom customers can expect to see AI Companion throughout the entire platform, from Meetings, Team Chat, Phone, Email, and Whiteboard, with additional features on the roadmap,” the company added. For example, a feature slated for the spring uses the AI companion to help users prepare for an upcoming meeting by surfacing details from previous sessions.
In offering the AI assistant, the video-conferencing provider is taking a “federated” approach, meaning customers will be able to choose which large language model they’d like to power the AI companion, whether it be from Zoom itself, Meta, OpenAI or Anthropic.
The company also reiterates it won’t use “any customer audio, video, chat, screen-sharing, attachments, or other communications” to train the AI models in response to last month’s controversy about Zoom’s terms of service.
Zoom plans on launching AI Companion sometime this fall for paid subscribers. Stay tuned for our review when we can better understand the strengths and limitations of the assistant.
Zoom rival Google Meet, meanwhile, announced similar AI-powered solutions recently. The company's Duet AI feature will soon be able to take notes for you, and if you can't attend a meeting, Duet will generate notes that other attendees can see and discuss.