Zoom on Wednesday launched new products at its Zoomtopia conference, including an upgraded AI companion that can work across meeting apps, as well as the ability to add your own notes, AI-powered meeting scheduling, and AI avatars that resemble users. With these features, the company aims to compete with verticalized meeting startups and productivity suites.
The company has long offered an AI bot that can record and transcribe Zoom meetings. However, cross-application meeting notetakers like Read AI, Otter, Fireflies, Granola, and Circleback have made great progress. To tackle that, Zoom is making its AI companion work with other platforms such as Meet and Microsoft Teams, along with a feature to take notes during in-person meetings.
The company is taking a page out of Granola’s book to let users jot down their own notes during meetings, then have AI expand and structure them later. Zoom is also adding cross-platform search so users can retrieve information from across Google and Microsoft’s platforms.
New calendar-related features are also on the way. Through its AI Companion, the company will allow users to find time slots that work for all attendees. Plus, it can suggest meetings you can skip through a new “free up my time” request. (Notably, calendar tool Clokcwise launched a similar tool last year to resolve meeting conflicts.)
The company is also rolling out proactive meeting recommendations, such as suggested tasks and agenda items for meeting prep, and a group AI assistant for a group.
Zoom will introduce photorealistic avatars to its platforms, too — something it’s talked about for some time. Earlier this year, the company’s CEO, Eric Yuan, used one during its quarterly call. The avatars will mime your actions on video and are useful when you are not “camera-ready,” Zoom said. However, there are deepfake risks involved with the misuse of personas that could see corporate IT departments scrambling to turn them off.
The feature is expected to be available to consumers by the end of the year.
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The update will introduce the ability for hosts to use Zoom Clips, its asynchronous video tool, and AI avatars to greet people in waiting rooms and to explain the purpose of the meeting.
AI will also aid in new live translation features.
What’s more, Zoom is launching an upgraded web interface to feature its AI companion more prominently, and other AI-powered features like a writing assistant to draft emails and documents, and a deep research feature, are being added.
Plus, Zoom will allow for the creation of custom AI agents with support for Model Context Protocol (MCP), support for higher bit rate and 60fps for Zoom meetings, and a new Zoom video management tool to manage video assets.
