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Click-clack, click-clack. That’s the sound of someone typing meeting notes during a Zoom call, and it’s super annoying. Like caffeinated chipmunks, people sometimes don’t realize they are clattering away on a keyboard. Yet, someone has to jot down action items and reminders.
That “someone” doesn’t have to be a human, though. Released last fall, Zoom’s new AI Companion feature—included with all paid Zoom subscriptions—is like having an admin assistant on every call. The bot can summarize a meeting, create action items, and even tell you who talked the most.
AI Companion uses large language models from OpenAI, Anthropic, and Meta but has also trained itself by listening in on thousands of meetings between Zoom employees, according to Smita Hashim, a chief product officer at Zoom. (“For confidentiality, we do not use any real conversations from our customers for any training purposes,” she says.)
While AI Companion is powerful, it’s not always obvious what you can do during a call or how the bot saves you time. I decided to hold several meetings and put Zoom’s AI helper through a series of tests. I’ll explain how to achieve these same results, providing the best prompts to get you started. And, I’ll cover what the AI Companion can’t quite do—yet.
Summarize a Meeting
During a meeting, you can access AI Companion by clicking the icon below the main video window. (It looks like a magic wand with sparkles.) Zoom provides a few built-in prompts to help you get started such as “Summarize the meeting,” which lists extensive bullet points based on what has been discussed so far. The AI Companion works like a human admin during meetings; you can have the bot create a whiteboard of ideas based on the real-time conversation as a way to visualize the discussion.
In my tests, it became obvious the feature works best when people are clear and intentional during the Zoom call. If you stick to a meeting plan, covering the most important topics in a succinct way, the summary is really useful. On one call talking about a new website design, the summary mentioned doing the design work, building a prototype, and testing. However, AI Companion did not always capture the talking points perfectly. In a meeting to plan out an overseas trip with family members, the conversation was too random, and the AI-generated summary I got afterward didn’t really make sense. Bots are teaching us how to live in their world, right? AI Companion works best when your meeting follows a well-defined structure.
Instead of a summary, you can also ask the AI Companion to “Catch me up” or ask “Does anyone have any action items?” The bot won’t summarize everything in the meeting but will mention a few high-level topics and takeaways. In the call about a vacation, the bot told me my daughter Rachel had just talked about flights. When your mind wanders during a meeting, asking for a catch-up is amazingly helpful. Not that any of us ever do that in Zoom meetings, of course.
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Tell You About the Tone
One of the most useful AI Companion features has to do with tone. You would think an AI bot would have a relatively low level of emotional intelligence and would be a poor judge of meeting vibes, but Zoom’s bot worked surprisingly well at reporting how the meeting went. In the AI Companion, you can type a question like “What was the general tone of the meeting?” and you’ll see a basic synopsis. That can be useful in a business setting if you are handling a conflict with a coworker or if you’re holding a sales call and you need to judge whether a customer seems interested.
In my tests, AI Companion picked up on some tension during a family chat about that vacation I mentioned. I met with Zoom’s Smita Hashim for a product demo, and AI Companion noted how the overall tone was generally positive. The bot noticed how Hashim spoke in a positive and uplifting way. It’s also fun to experiment with questions like “Was anyone angry in the meeting?”
Who Is Doing Most of the Speaking?
One last feature that impressed me had to do with judging who talked the most during a meeting. In my test call talking about web design, it turns out—it was me! I found that helpful to learn, because I realized I need to ask more questions and listen more.
I was surprised to discover you can’t ask the bot to tell you how long each person talked. You can generate a transcript from a recording, though, and tell at a glance who dominated the conversation more than anyone else. There’s also a way to create shareable, bite-size videos of a meeting so people can watch specific segments.
What the Bot Can’t Do Yet
The scope of what artificial intelligence can do seems magical at times. However, there are a few “gotchas” with AI Companion. For example, while you can invoke an AI avatar that can replace your face on your video feed, they can’t act on your behalf or fill in for you during meetings. I had the idea to ask an avatar to speak for me based on a prompt like “Explain who I am to everyone,” but that doesn’t work. The avatars are more like colorful pictures and less like bots that would allow you to play more golf and skip meetings altogether.
Zoom offers powerful chat and document features, but I was also surprised that the AI Companion can’t schedule Zoom meetings with a group of people and figure out the best time based on everyone’s calendars. That’s a feature that’s likely coming, though; in Team Chat mode (which is almost like a Slack group) you can initiate meetings with just a click.
Lastly, we can all breathe a sigh of relief: AI Companion is not “on” by default. The host must enable and activate the bot, and in corporate environments your IT department might not allow it at all. The bot can listen and help, but only if you want that to happen.
Overall, the AI Companion saved time in an important way: No one had to take notes in any of my meetings, and the final summaries were all quite useful. No clicking or clacking!
