Zoom further cemented its place in the artificial intelligence (AI) space by announcing the launch of the Zoom AI Companion (formerly called Zoom IQ) on Tuesday.
This move further expands Zoom’s investment in AI since its introduction of generative AI features such as Team Chat compose and Meeting summary in June. Now, Zoom has announced a generative AI digital assistant that will be available at no additional cost for users with paid accounts.
According to Zoom, the new AI Companion reiterates Zoom’s vision to deliver “limitless human connection on one platform, empowering people by increasing their productivity, enhancing their skills, and improving team effectiveness.” The rollout of this new feature will begin this fall, according to a press statement.
“We are transcending the hype in generative AI by delivering tangible products and disrupting the industry’s pricing model, making it easy for businesses and people like you and me to leverage generative AI’s full benefits in our day-to-day work,” Smita Hashim, chief product officer at Zoom said in the statement.
The AI Companion is designed to improve productivity and make it easier to work collaboratively. For instance, when using Zoom Meetings, users can make use of highlights and smart chapters, and review summaries to catch up faster on a missed meeting. During a meeting, if the AI Companion is enabled by the host, attendees can submit questions to the AI Companion side panel and receive AI-generated answers on what they need, the press statement explains.
After the meeting, hosts can receive an automated meeting summary that can be shared with attendees as well as those who missed the meeting.
Moreover, the Zoom AI Companion also makes it possible for users to quickly draft messages based on the context of a chat thread, which significantly reduces the time spent on composing replies.
Zoom has announced that by early 2024, users will be able to auto-complete chat sentences and schedule meetings from a chat as well as add meeting summaries to Zoom Notes and summarize SMS threads and calls with Zoom Phone, the statement explains.
Zoom also emphasised that it puts customers’ privacy first when venturing into generative AI. In August, Zoom faced an uproar about users’ privacy after it recently made privacy and AI policy changes. However, in a blog post, Zoom clarified it “will not use audio, video, or chat Customer Content to train our artificial intelligence models without your consent."
In this press statement, Zoom reassured that it puts the users’ privacy first and will not use customer content to train Zoom’s or third-party artificial intelligence model.
