According to a blog post published on Tuesday, the videoconferencing and messaging network Zoom is entering the market for built-in generative AI assistants. Users who already have paid subscriptions to the services will have immediate access to the additional capabilities, according to the announcement, which will rebrand Zoom IQ as the Zoom AI Companion.
Zoom claims that its “AI Companion” may provide customers with contextual and practical intelligence, mapping to the obstacles present in a typical workday.
What the AI Companion for Zoom offers?
The blog post claims that the AI assistant may aid with chat response composition, saving time and enabling users to concentrate on crucial tasks. AI Companion can help a participant who arrives late in a meeting catch up by summarising the conversations. Additionally, it may provide detailed answers to queries regarding the meeting’s content and automatically provide summaries, identify key details, and outline next steps for participants.
Zoom has future plans to increase the functionality of AI Companion. Users will be able to communicate with the assistant using natural language inquiries and get assistance with a variety of activities, including organising meetings, composing emails, identifying pertinent documents, and summarising chat messages. In addition, AI Companion will help with support ticket submission, real-time information sharing during meetings, and call and message analysis.
The article also provided some fresh information on Zoom’s “federated approach” to choosing its AI models. By “dynamically incorporating Zoom’s own large language model (LLM) in addition to Meta Llama 2, OpenAI, and Anthropic,” it expects the AI Companion would produce better results.
By employing this tactic, Zoom users avoid the difficulty of selecting the ideal model to take advantage of the newest features and advantages.
Data used to train AI assistants is still debatable.
According to a blog post published on Tuesday, the videoconferencing and messaging network Zoom is entering the market for built-in generative AI assistants. Users who already have paid subscriptions to the services will have immediate access to the additional capabilities, according to the announcement, which will rebrand Zoom IQ as the Zoom AI Companion.
Zoom claims that its “AI Companion” may provide customers with contextual and practical intelligence, mapping to the obstacles present in a typical workday.
Zoom responded to the controversy by writing a blog post in which it stated that “as part of our commitment to transparency and user control, we are offering clarification on our approach to two key areas of our services: Zoom’s AI features and customer information sharing for product improvement objectives. We’re here to explain how we accomplish our goal of giving Zoom account administrators and owners control over these options and capabilities.
The blog post announcing the AI assistant reiterated those points: “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,” it read.
Disabled by Default
Administrators and account operators will be able to toggle some AI-enabled functions on and off in the Zoom AI Companion’s initial release, but all capabilities will be deactivated by default. Hosts will have more precise controls discovered in each meeting even when the capabilities are enabled by account admins. The status of the AI technologies being used will also be made available to meeting attendees.
Controversies surrounding Zoom’s usage of AI in its products are nothing new. The business faced criticism in April 2022 after claiming that emotion AI elements might soon be incorporated into its sales-targeted products. In an open letter to the corporation, the nonprofit advocacy group Fight for the Future claimed that the potential Zoom product would constitute a “major breach of user trust,” be “inherently biassed,” and be “a marketing gimmick.”
