Web conferencing platform Zoom has added new AI features, intended to save participants time and ensure they don't miss any vital details.
The new additions to Zoom IQ will allow users to automatically catch up with missed meetings, create whiteboards and even suggest actions for meeting participants to take.
Zoom is the latest company to add AI features, and the explosion shows no signs of slowing down, with the likes of Microsoft and Google betting big on the emerging tech.
New AI Additions to Zoom IQ
Zoom IQ isn't a new feature – the company has actually been slowing adding AI to the service for the past year. This includes using AI to analyze customer interactions, and smart meeting recording.
Now, Zoom has added even more AI-backed functions to its web conferencing platform, all designed to save time and make the collaborative process easier. If an attendee is late for a meeting, for example, or misses it entirely, they can use Zoom IQ to generate a summary of the main points of the meeting.
Whiteboards can also be created from prompts that may occur during the meeting, and come pre-populated with potential ideas. At the end of the meeting, a meeting recap will be generated, with suggested actions for participants to take next.
The new feature can also be used to generate messages to clients, based on the the context provided by the notes made. Here, users can decide if they want to write a short, medium or long message, as well as what sort of tone they'd like to opt for – be it friendly, formal, or, if you have a particularly good rapport with your client, sarcastic (probably don't use that one).
Zoom Competitors Using AI
There's no doubt that we'll see a lot more AI in our work platforms from now on, and Zoom's competitors aren't slouching here. Last year, Google introduced some AI features to Meet, which included intelligent image quality improvements, and live transcripts of meeting notes. Like Zoom's IQ, Meet can also summarize meetings for attendees who weren't there (or just those that don't want to have to physically take notes).
As you might expect from the company with a $10 billion investment in OpenAI, Microsoft is currently putting as much AI into its platforms as it possibly can, and Microsoft Teams is no exception. You'll need to cough up for the premium Teams package to get this kind of functionality, but if you do, you can expect ‘intelligent recap', which is similar to what Google and Zoom offer – automatically generated meeting notes with suggested actions.
In addition, Teams offers personalized time markers, which will note when you entered or left a meeting, and let you quickly replay the parts you missed.
Teams also includes AI-generated translations for 40 spoken languages. While this feature is Premium specific, only the meeting host needs to have the premium version of Teams for translations to be accessible to attendees.
The rise of collaboration platforms has been meteoric in the last three years, thanks to the pandemic, but with the application of AI, we're likely to see an unprecedented arms race between providers as they attempt to woo us with time-saving tech.
