In a recent press release, Zoom revealed exciting updates to its AI-powered assistant Zoom IQ now rebranded as the AI Companion.
The update aims to provide users with an improved, immersive communication experience by integrating AI Companion into the Zoom ecosystem, including Zoom Whiteboard, Zoom Team Chat, and Zoom Mail, Tech Crunch Reported.
Zoom’s goal is to invest in AI-driven innovation that enhances user experience and productivity while prioritizing trust, safety, and privacy.
Initially, the AI Companion will function as a ChatGPT-like bot, expected to launch in spring 2024. The conversational interface integration allows users to directly chat and question the AI Companion about past meetings and chats or even perform actions on their behalf.
For example, users can inquire about the project’s status or ask for meeting summaries.
Apart from this, the AI Companion offering suggestions in Team Chat is another anticipated feature that will provide real-time evaluations of users’ presence in meetings and coaching on their conversational and presentation skills.
However, considering potential privacy concerns, Zoom assures that these real-time feedback services can be activated or deactivated by an account owner or administrator according to their preference.
Complementing Zoom’s messaging app, Zoom Team Chat, users will soon be able to summarize chat threads through the AI Companion. Moreover, by early 2024, auto-complete chat sentences will be incorporated, providing an experience similar to Microsoft Teams and Google Meet’s AI-generated replies.
Zoom Whiteboard, the company’s collaborative whiteboarding tool, will also receive an AI-infused update by spring 2024, where the AI Companion will populate templates and generate images. However, what AI model will power this feature remains unclear.
In terms of email client Zoom Mail, users will receive AI-generated email suggestions from the AI Companion by early fall, similar to the previous provision by Zoom IQ. Furthermore, the feature to add meeting summaries and summarize SMS threads from Zoom’s VoIP service, Zoom Phone, is expected by spring 2024.
The AI Companion features will primarily be accessible from Zoom’s app’s side panel. However, the catch here is that only paying Zoom customers will be able to take advantage of them.
Zoom also announced the rebranding of ‘Zoom IQ for Sales’ to ‘Zoom Revenue Accelerator.’ Initially poorly received due to controversial sentiment analysis algorithm usage, Zoom shifted its focus towards more common use cases.
New features include a “virtual coach” to simulate conversations for onboarding and training the sales team, deal risk signals, and competitor mention trends.
With these cutting-edge updates, Zoom is undoubtedly trying to regain its video-communication market share, leveraging advanced AI technology to enhance the virtual experience of its users. Time will tell how well these new features, especially the AI Companion, will be adopted by users worldwide.
