Zoom announced new artificial intelligence (AI) features for its platform at its annual Zoomtopia event on Wednesday. The video conferencing platform introduced the AI Companion 2.0, the second generation of the AI assistant which can now handle more tasks. Available across Zoom Workplace, the company’s AI-powered collaboration platform, it can now access Zoom Mail, Zoom Tasks, and more. Additionally, the company also launched custom AI avatar, which will let users record a video to generate an AI clone of themselves which can speak in a similar voice.
Zoom AI Companion 2.0 Introduced
In a newsroom post, the company introduced the new AI assistant for the Zoom Workplace platform. It is similar to the Gemini assistant in Android smartphones or Copilot in AI PCs. The AI Companion is the central hub for most of the AI features added by the company. Users can use it to summarise documents, generate text, and more.
With the second iteration of the AI assistant, Workplace users can access prompt suggestions in the side panel across all Zoom platforms. Users can also expand the context of information by connecting Gmail, Microsoft Outlook, and other similar apps. The assistant can also summarise unread messages within a Zoom Team Chat channel and recap email threads in Zoom Mail.
Within Zoom calls, the AI assistant can now answer questions outside of the context of the meeting by searching the web. Hence, participants can ask general knowledge and current affairs queries to the AI while in the meeting. AI Companion 2.0 can also answer questions about the content discussed in a meeting even after the meeting has ended. Further, the conversations with the AI are now available to refer back to after the end of the meeting.
Zoom Introduces Custom AI Avatar
Another interesting feature unveiled at the event is Custom avatars for Zoom Clips. It lets users record a video clip, which is then processed by an AI model to generate an avatar. Only the bust of the avatar is visible including the head, shoulders, and upper arms. The feature can also generate a voice similar to the user. If a user adds a text script, the AI avatar will be able to speak and lip sync to it.
While this feature was showcased at the Zoomtopia event, it will not be available to users till 2025.
