Zoom rolls out AI Companion; Know how you can benefit, but there is a price to pay

To keep up, and possibly gain an upper hand over its competitors, Zoom has announced a rebranded AI assistant called AI Companion that will assist users in day-to-day activities.

Zoom AI Companion can summarize meetings, and chats, and provide analysis of recorded phone calls. (Zoom)

The shift to a hybrid work environment following the COVID-19 pandemic has led to a surge in the emergence of online communications platforms. Microsoft Teams, Zoom and Google Meet are just some of the companies battling it out to provide workspace to organizations. This healthy competition has led to innovation with these platforms becoming one place for meetings, document storage, chats, and more. To keep up, and possibly gain an upper hand over its competitors, Zoom has announced a rebranded AI companion that will assist users in day-to-day activities.

Zoom AI Companion

Zoom is not new to AI technology, and it has rebranded its existing generative AI assistant known as Zoom IQ to Zoom AI Companion. It can help compose chat responses based on the user's prompts with the right tone and length. The AI Companion can also generate summaries and help you catch up on the stuff you have missed. Harnessing the power of AI, the generative AI assistant can automatically divide cloud recordings into smart chapters for easy review, create steps for action, and highlight important information.

In a blog post, the company announced, “We're excited to introduce you to AI Companion (formerly Zoom IQ), your new generative AI assistant across the Zoom platform. AI Companion empowers individuals by helping them be more productive, connect and collaborate with teammates, and improve their skills.”

Upcoming features

The Zoom AI Companion will also get a feature later this month that allows it to summarize your chat messages, and offer reply suggestions. Another upcoming feature will enable the AI assistant to generate ideas on a digital whiteboard and organize them into categories. Zoom Phone is also set to get AI features.

With AI Companion, users will be able to access an AI-generated analysis of their recorded phone calls and summaries of their voicemails as well as messages. Additionally, users will soon be able to converse with the AI assistant in ChatGPT-style text-based prompts.

Availability

The Zoom AI Companion and its suite of smart features will be available to Zoom paid subscribers at no additional cost. Free users can upgrade to paid plans to take advantage of Zoom's AI features.

Navigating the privacy concerns that have troubled Zoom in the past few months, the company has announced that “Zoom does not use any of your audio, video, chat, screen sharing, attachments, or other communications-like customer content (such as poll results, whiteboard, and reactions) to train Zoom's or third-party artificial intelligence models.”