Zoom adds AI companion that can summarize meetings, write responses

The video-conferencing app Zoom is now making its AI personal assistant tool available to paid accounts “at no additional cost.” 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. 

The tool, called “Zoom AI Companion,” was recently released as a free trial for companies using the video conferencing platform. Now, AI Companion is a part of standard Zoom subscriptions. Starting Tuesday, if you or your company pays for a Zoom account, you’ll be able to use AI Companion, which does tasks like composing Zoom Chat messages and summarizing meetings.

Zoom, which surged in popularity when the pandemic made many workers remote, recently came under fire for its terms of service which said it may use video calls and other user data to train its models.

Following swift backlash, Zoom updated its terms and quickly published a blog post clarifying its policy, saying “for AI, we do not use audio, video, or chat content for training our models without customer consent.”

That remains true for its AI Companion tool. And, Zoom added, AI Companion is toggled off by default. Account owners and admins can choose to enable this feature, and users have visibility when these features are being used or activated.

If enabled in Zoom Meetings, attendees can use AI Companion to catch up on what they missed in a private side-panel conversation with the AI. When a meeting ends, the admin can generate and share a meeting summary with attendees, or those who were invited but couldn’t attend the meeting.

Within Zoom Team Chat, users can recruit AI Companion to summarize messages and generate drafts of replies and new messages — similar to Slack’s AI tool. Message drafting is live now, and summarization will be available in the coming weeks.

Now that Zoom has confirmed it doesn’t spy on your video calls, the trade-off for using Zoom is much less consequential. And with AI Companion, you know what you’re opting into.