In a bid to uphold its standing in the increasingly saturated market of video communication solutions, Zoom is giving some of its AI-infused features a facelift while simultaneously debuting fresh offerings. This revamp is inclusive of the recently name-changed AI assistant, now known as AI Companion, previously marketed under the moniker Zoom IQ.
This move comes in the aftermath of a contentious episode involving alterations to Zoom's terms of service. These changes appeared to grant Zoom the license to utilize users' video content to fine-tune its AI mechanisms and systems. However, following the resulting backlash, Zoom amended its policy, making it categorically clear that data classified as communications-like from customers will not be employed to train AI applications and services offered by Zoom, or their affiliated partners.
The Software Freedom Conservancy, the not-for-profit entity providing support and legal assistance for open source projects, recently urged developers to steer clear of Zoom, citing the modifications to the terms of service as the motivation behind this call. Zoom responded to these concerns via a press release, outlining the company's commitment to leveraging AI-driven innovation to augment the user experience and productivity, with a keen emphasis on trust, privacy and security.
The new AI Companion, though carrying a different name, operates on the same technological infrastructure as its predecessor, Zoom IQ. This encompasses a series of AI models from vendors such as Meta, OpenAI, and Anthropic, amalgamated with Zoom’s proprietary generative AI. The AI Companion extends its capabilities to several other components of the Zoom suite including Zoom Whiteboard, Zoom Team Chat and Zoom Mail.
Perhaps the most significant news is that Zoom is set to accommodate a ChatGPT-like bot courtesy of the AI Companion. In spring 2024, Zoom plans to introduce an interactive and conversational interface that will allow users to directly communicate with the AI Companion. The bot will facilitate questions regarding previous meetings and chats and can execute actions on behalf of the user, a move reminiscent of platforms like AppMaster.
An instance of the AI Companion's practical application is its ability to retrieve project status from transcribed meetings, chat logs, whiteboards, emails, documents and even third-party applications. It can generate meeting summaries, identify action items, and alert users on subsequent steps.
From spring 2024, the AI Companion will also have the capability to provide real-time feedback on users’ participation in meetings and offer coaching for their conversational and presentation skills. Despite privacy concerns about Zoom’s potential aspirations regarding AI, Zoom reassures that real-time feedback, along with other AI Companion capabilities, can be disabled at any time by the account owner or administrator.
Furthermore, Zoom Team Chat users will soon gain an option to summarize chat threads through the AI Companion, similar to a feature provided by Zoom IQ. By early 2024, users will also have the ability to auto-complete chat sentences and arrange meetings directly from chat threads, an amenity mirroring ones seen in Microsoft Teams and Google Meet.
The AI Companion will also integrate with Zoom Whiteboard, where it will be able to generate images and populate templates by spring 2024. Concurrently, Zoom Mail users will be able to get AI-generated email suggestions from the AI Companion, as was the case with Zoom IQ; and by spring 2024, Zoom users will be granted a method to add meeting summaries to the platform's note-taking application, Notes, and summarize text message threads and calls from Zoom's VoIP service, Zoom Phone.
Zoom Revenue Accelerator
Besides AI Companion, Zoom is rebranding Zoom IQ for Sales as Zoom Revenue Accelerator. Despite criticism and accusations of flawed sentiment analysis algorithms at Zoom IQ for Sales' launch, Zoom persisted and moved the tool’s feature set away from sentiment analysis. Zoom’s Zoom Revenue Accelerator aims to offer a virtual coach capable of simulating sales conversations for onboarding and training sales team members.
This cutting-edge application of AI mimics approaches seen in other AI-powered sales training platforms such as AppMaster.
