Click, click. That’s it. It’s so loud during Zoom calls when someone is typing meeting notes, they’re oblivious to the sound of someone tapping away at their keyboard like a caffeinated chipmunk, but someone still has to jot down action items and reminders.
But that “someone” doesn’t have to be a human: Zoom’s new AI Companion feature, released last fall (and included in all paid Zoom subscriptions), is like having an administrative assistant on every call. The bot can summarize the meeting, create action items, and even tell you who spoke the most.
According to Smita Hashim, Zoom’s chief product officer, the AI companion uses large-scale language models from OpenAI, Anthropic, and Meta, but trains itself by listening to thousands of meetings between Zoom employees. (“Due to confidentiality, we don’t use actual conversations with customers for training purposes,” she says.)
AI companions are powerful, but it’s not always clear what they can do during a call or how the bot can save you time. So we decided to host a few meetings and put Zoom’s AI helper through a battery of tests. We’ll explain how to achieve the same results and give you the best prompts to get started. We’ll also explain what the AI companion can’t do yet.
Summarize the meeting
During a meeting, you can access your AI Companion by clicking the icon below your main video window (it looks like a sparkly magic wand). Zoom has some built-in prompts to help you get started; for example, “Meeting summary” lists detailed bullet points based on what’s been discussed so far. Your AI Companion acts like a human moderator during your meeting; you can have the bot whiteboard ideas and visualize your discussions based on your real-time conversations.
My testing revealed that the feature works best when people are speaking clearly and purposefully during Zoom calls. Summary is extremely useful if you closely follow a meeting plan and cover the most important topics concisely. In one call where we discussed a new website design, the summary mentioned the design work, building a prototype, and testing. However, the AI Companion didn’t always perfectly capture the main points. In one meeting to plan an international trip with family, the conversation was too random, and the AI-generated summary I received afterwards didn’t make much sense. The bot is teaching us how to live in their world. The AI Companion works best when the meeting follows a clearly defined structure.
Instead of summarizing, you can ask your AI companion to “tell me a story” or ask, “Any action items?” The bot won’t summarize everything from the meeting, but it will mention some key topics and takeaways. On a vacation call, the bot told me that my daughter, Rachel, had just spoken about her flight. If you get distracted during a meeting, a story can be surprisingly helpful. Of course, no one does that in a Zoom meeting.
