Zoom Unveils Free AI Companion for Paid Users

Zoom has unveiled its Zoom AI Companion, formerly known as Zoom IQ, as part of its paid Zoom user accounts at no extra cost. This generative AI digital assistant aligns with Zoom’s mission to facilitate seamless human connections on a single platform, improving productivity, skills, and team efficiency. Additionally, Zoom IQ for Sales will now be called Zoom Revenue Accelerator.

Zoom initially introduced generative AI in June, offering free trials of Team Chat compose and Meeting summary. In the upcoming fall, Zoom plans to expand its generative AI capabilities with AI Companion for paid Zoom user accounts, extending across various Zoom features such as Meetings, Team Chat, Phone, Email, and Whiteboard.

This innovation leverages a federated approach to AI, integrating both Zoom’s large language models and third-party models like Meta Llama 2, OpenAI, and Anthropic to provide robust real-time digital assistant capabilities.

Smita Hashim, Chief Product Officer at Zoom, emphasized the company’s commitment to delivering tangible AI products while disrupting pricing models to make generative AI accessible to businesses and individuals.

Zoom prioritizes customer privacy by ensuring that customer data, including audio, video, chat, and more, is not used for training its AI models. AI Companion remains off by default, allowing account owners and administrators to control its activation, ensuring customer confidence and control.

Zoom AI Companion enhances collaboration and productivity by streamlining tasks, removing repetitive work, and supporting effective teamwork. It offers real-time AI capabilities in various aspects of modern work, including:

– Zoom Meetings: Users can quickly review meeting recordings with highlights and smart chapters, submit questions during meetings for AI-generated answers, and receive automated meeting summaries. Future features include real-time feedback and coaching on presentation skills.

– Zoom Team Chat: AI Companion aids in drafting messages based on chat context, offers generative AI summarization of long chat threads, and enables sentence auto-completion and meeting scheduling.

– Zoom Whiteboard: AI Companion assists in generating and categorizing ideas, with future features allowing content generation and template population.

– Zoom Mail: Users will receive draft email suggestions, and in the future, they can add meeting summaries to Notes and summarize SMS threads and calls with Zoom Phone.

– Conversational Interface: In spring 2024, a conversational interface will be introduced, enabling users to interact with AI Companion across the Zoom platform. This includes pre-meeting preparation, real-time support during meetings, and post-meeting tasks like summarizing and identifying action items.

Users can access AI Companion within their existing Zoom workflows through an intuitive interface. Interactive capabilities will expand across the Zoom platform in spring 2024 as additional features are rolled out.