Zoom can now give you AI summaries of the meetings you’ve missed

Zoom can now give you AI summaries of the meetings you’ve missed

Image: Zoom

Zoom now lets users use AI to catch up on missed meetings. The feature, which Zoom first announced in March, has finally arrived as a trial for users in “select plans,” according to a post on Zoom’s website.

With Zoom IQ — the app’s AI-powered assistant — hosts can now generate summaries of meetings and send them to users through Zoom Team Chat or email, all without actually recording the meetings. It’s hard to tell how accurate (or detailed) the meeting summaries are without trying them out for ourselves, but it still seems like a much quicker way to get a recap on anything you’ve missed, as opposed to watching an entire prerecorded meeting.

In addition to AI-generated meeting summaries, Zoom is launching the ability to compose messages in Team Chat using AI. The feature leverages OpenAI’s technology to create messages “based on the context of a Team Chat thread” and also lets you customize the tone or length of a message before you send it.

Image: Zoom

All of these features build upon what Zoom’s IQ assistant already offers, such as the ability to create meeting highlights and chapters. In the near future, Zoom plans on rolling out several other AI-powered features through its partnership with OpenAI and Anthropic.

That includes the ability to write emails with AI using context from previous meetings, phone calls, and emails as well as a way to summarize threads in Zoom Team Chat “with the click of a button.” Zoom is also working on a way for you to use AI to “discreetly” obtain an in-chat summary of a meeting when you arrive late, create whiteboard drafts with text prompts, and automatically organize ideas into categories during brainstorming sessions.

According to Zoom, the company “collects data from users’ interactions with the Zoom IQ features, including inputs, messages, and AI-generated content” and could use this information to train Zoom IQ AI models (but not third-party ones) unless you choose not to share data with Zoom. Alongside Zoom, other productivity platforms, including Salesforce’s Slack and Microsoft 365, have begun incorporating AI features as well. Slack, for example, lets you reply to colleagues with ChatGPT and could soon have AI attend Huddles on your behalf, while Microsoft has rolled out an AI Copilot for its 365 apps.

For now, though, only Zoom IQ’s meeting summaries and chat compose features are available as a free trial “for a limited time” to subscribers of Zoom One (Enterprise Plus, Enterprise, Business Plus, Business, Pro) and some Zoom legacy bundles (Enterprise Named Host, Enterprise Active Host, Zoom Meetings Enterprise, Zoom Meetings Business, Zoom Meetings Pro). It’s unclear how much these features will cost after the free trial, however, but Zoom spokesperson Lacretia Taylor tells The Verge that the company will reveal pricing information “in the coming months.”