Zoom Makes 'AI Companion' Available To Paid Customers At 'No Additional Cost'

Generative AI is the hype, and people keep getting astonished to what the technology can do.

Since OpenAI introduced ChatGPT, it quickly captivated the world, and sent many others into frenzy. The technology, which is literally Large Language Models, is a chatbot capable of interacting with users with a lot of things.

While late in the game, Zoom Video Communications, Inc. wants to piggyback the hype a bit, in order to enhance its offering.

The company known for its Zoom app, said that it's making its AI personal assistant tool available to paid accounts "at no additional cost."

Previously, the tool, called "Zoom AI Companion," has been released as a free trial for companies using the video conferencing platform.

But this time, the tool is becoming part of standard Zoom subscriptions.

Zoom users who paid for an account, should be able to use AI Companion, which does tasks like composing Zoom Chat messages and summarizing meetings.

If enabled in Zoom Meetings, for example, attendees can use AI Companion to catch up on what they missed in a private side-panel conversation with the AI. When a meeting ends, the admin can generate and share a meeting summary with attendees, or those who were invited but couldn't attend the meeting.

And when used within Zoom Team Chat, users can recruit AI Companion to summarize messages and generate drafts of replies and new messages.

Using generative AI capabilities, AI Companion can help draft messages, and change the tone or length of the draft message with a click of a button.

The same function can also summarize a long chat thread.

"If enabled by the meeting host, attendees can catch up quickly without disrupting the meeting flow by discreetly submitting questions via the in-meeting AI Companion side panel to receive an AI-generated answer on what they missed," Zoom said. "Postmeeting, hosts can receive an automated meeting summary to share with attendees and those who were unable to attend a meeting."

"We are transcending the hype in generative AI by delivering tangible products and disrupting the industry’s pricing model," explained Zoom Chief Product Officer Smita Hashim.

"We also have components of our platform that are really powered by AI that are stand-alone skews," said Zoom Chief Financial Officer Kelly Steckelberg. "We have Zoom Virtual Agent, which sits beside our contact center solution. It was really powered by our recent acquisition of Solvia... and it's a virtual agent that can respond to... simple queries."

Steckelberg also said that AI Companion is one of the company's strategy to get more paying users.

"Well, we want to use this as a way to motivate them to convert, right. I mean, there's lots of value you get in our free platform already. But this is one way you'll continue to see that differentiation between paid and free," she said.

Just before this, Zoom, which surged in popularity when the COVID-19 pandemic made many workers around the world work remotely, was under fire for its terms of service which said that it may use video calls and other user data to train its models.

Following the backlash, Zoom quickly updated its terms, and published a blog post clarifying its policy, saying "for AI, we do not use audio, video, or chat content for training our models without customer consent."

And this remains true to its AI Companion tool

According to Zoom, AI Companion is toggled off by default, and users who wish to use this feature should enable it manually.

And to ensure privacy, users have visibility when these features are being used or activated.

"Zoom customers can expect to see AI Companion throughout the entire platform, from Meetings, Team Chat, Phone, Email, and Whiteboard, with additional features on the roadmap," the company added.

What's worth noting here, Zoon is offering its AI assistant using a "federated" approach, meaning that customers should be able to choose which large language model they'd like to power the AI companion, whether it be from Zoom itself, Meta, OpenAI or Anthropic.