Click-click, click-click. That’s it. the sound of someone typing meeting notes during a Zoom call, and it’s super annoying. Like squirrels on caffeine, people sometimes don’t realize they’re typing away. And yet, someone has to write down to-dos and reminders.
This “someone” doesn’t have to be a human being, though. Released last fall, Zoom’s New AI Companion Feature—included with all paid Zoom subscriptions—it’s like having an administrative assistant on every call. The bot can summarize the meeting, create action items, and even tell you who talked the most.
According to Smita Hashim, Zoom’s chief product officer, AI Companion uses gigantic language models from OpenAI, Anthropic, and Meta, but it also trained itself by eavesdropping on thousands of meetings between Zoom employees. (“For confidentiality reasons, we don’t use any real conversations with our customers for training purposes,” she says.)
Meeting Summary
During a meeting, you can access the AI Companion by clicking an icon below the main video window. (It looks like a magic wand with sparkles.) Zoom provides several built-in prompts to support you get started, such as a “Meeting Summary,” which includes a comprehensive bullet point summary of what’s been discussed so far. The AI Companion acts as a human administrator during meetings; you can have the bot create an idea board based on the real-time conversation as a way to visualize the discussion.
During my testing, it became clear that the feature works best when people are clear and purposeful during the Zoom call. If you stick to the agenda of the meeting, covering the most critical topics in a concise manner, the summary is really useful. During one conversation about a modern website project, the summary mentioned doing some design work, building a prototype, and testing. However, AI Companion didn’t always capture the points perfectly. During a meeting to plan an international trip with family members, the conversation was too random, and the AI-generated summary I received afterward didn’t make sense. Bots teach us how to live in their world, right? AI Companion works best when the meeting follows a well-defined structure.
Instead of a recap, you can also ask the AI Companion to “Catch me up” or ask, “Does anyone have any tasks to do?” The bot won’t recap everything in the meeting, but it will mention some critical topics and takeaways. During a conversation about vacations, the bot told me that my daughter Rachel had just talked about flights. When your mind wanders during a meeting, asking for a catch-up is incredibly helpful. Of course, none of us ever does that in Zoom meetings.