When you arrive late to meetings, Zoom’s latest “AI Companion” will catch you up

According to Zoom on Tuesday, the generative artificial intelligence tool known as Zoom AI Companion will begin “significantly” expanding its capabilities this fall. The announcement says that if you already pay for the video-meeting service, AI Companion will be available for free.

According to Zoom, customers can anticipate seeing the AI tool in Team Chat, Meetings, Phone, Email, Whiteboard, and “additional features on the roadmap” in the near future. According to Zoom, some features will launch immediately, while others will do so in the coming months.

Video chatting for work meetings is probably Zoom’s most well-known feature. If you are running late to a Zoom meeting, you can use a new feature in Zoom AI Companion to quickly catch up by asking questions through a side panel. As long as the host of the meeting allows these features, you can get auto-generated meeting summaries and Zoom recordings with highlights and smart chapters broken out after the meeting.

Zoom claims that its AI tool will be able to coach you on your communication and presentation skills and provide “real-time feedback” on how it perceives your performance in meetings by this spring.

The introduction of generative AI summarization for Team Chat, which will help you catch up on lengthy chat threads, is one of the other updates to Zoom. You will be able to schedule meetings and have sentences automatically completed by early 2024. Meeting preparation, debriefing, and other features will also be added.

Zoom stated on Tuesday that AI Companion is disabled by default, and the account owner will be responsible for enabling them. Additionally, the company stated that it does not train its AI with customer audio, video, or other content. Concerns about Zoom “slurping” data for its AI tools led to this.

Zoom stated that its AI feature is powered by both its own large language models and those of Meta’s Llama 2, OpenAI, and Anthropic. generative AI chatbots like Google’s Bard, Microsoft’s Bing, and OpenAI’s ChatGPT are powered by large language models.