Zoom has launched various AI-supported features now enabled for users in the Brown University community. This article provides an overview of the features that are now provided, as well as some of the settings that meeting hosts can use to control the availability of these features.
Zoom does not use any of your audio, video, chat, screen sharing, attachments or other content collected during the meeting (such as poll results, whiteboard, and reactions) to train Zoom’s or third-party artificial intelligence models.
Note: Direct Messages within the Zoom in-meeting chat are private and not included in any AI Companion activity.
AI Companion panel
The Zoom AI Companion smart assistant appears in the Zoom Workplace app and can be opened with the AI sparkle icon in the app header to ask it questions. AI Companion is able to access Zoom data available to a specific user (e.g. meeting summaries), as well as any enabled third-party data sources, to help answer those questions.
Enable AI Companion
To enable or disable the AI Companion Panel in Zoom Workplace for your own use:
- Sign in to brown.zoom.us > Settings > AI Companion (direct link)
- Under General, click the AI Companion panel in Zoom Workplace toggle to enable or disable it.
Actions that can be performed within the AI Companion panel
- If you haven’t already, link your Google Calendar with Zoom.
- In the Zoom app, click a meeting in the Calendar tab, then click Open full meeting details.
- From the AI Companion panel, select one of the options or type your own prompt.
Useful prompts:
- Help me write an agenda for this meeting
- Recap this meeting
- What did (participant’s name) say about (topic)?
- Draft a project plan from this meeting summary
Zoom documentation: Using the AI Companion panel within the Zoom Workplace desktop app
Meeting summary
As a host, you can generate a summary of your meetings. These summaries can be generated based on a machine-generated transcript of meeting audio, and optionally including chat messages and/or content from a shared screen. Summaries are sent after the meeting has ended based on the share options.
Enable meeting summaries
To enable or disable the ability to generate meeting summaries with AI:
- Sign in to brown.zoom.us > Settings > AI Companion (direct link)
- Under Meeting, click the Meeting summary with AI Companion toggle to enable or disable it.
If enabled, there are several other settings which affect the use of this feature:
- Automatically share summary with — Meeting summaries can be automatically shared with other hosts. Note: we strongly advise reviewing and editing transcripts and/or summaries before sharing with others.
- Remind me to turn on AI Companion when I'm hosting a meeting — Meeting summary will not automatically start when your meeting does. If you usually want a summary to be generated, you can enable this setting to receive a reminder to enable it when starting a meeting you’re the host of.
- Use screen share content with OCR — If enabled, Zoom will use optical character recognition to identify content within shared screens to use with the AI Companion.
- Use meeting chat messages — If enabled, the Zoom AI Companion will have access to the text of chat messages during the meeting.
Zoom documentation: Using Meeting Summary with AI Companion
Recording
Zoom AI features can be used to augment your recordings with highlights, smart chapters, next steps, and a virtual meeting coach.
Enable Zoom AI features for your recordings
To enable or disable the ability to generate content on whiteboard using Zoom AI:
- Sign in to brown.zoom.us > Settings > AI Companion (direct link)
- Under Recording, click the Smart recording with AI Companion toggle to enable or disable it.
Recording highlights
If enabled, Zoom AI Companion will highlight the parts of the meeting which it thinks are more important. You can manually adjust highlights as needed and can save highlights as a separate video to cut parts of the recording that may be less necessary. Note: if sharing highlights in this manner, we recommend manually reviewing to ensure that nothing important is lost.
Smart chapters
If enabled, Zoom AI Companion will automatically group the recording into different sections with timestamps. You can click on a chapter to watch the part of the recording starting at that timestamp. Viewers who watch the cloud recording can see the smart chapters and next steps. Smart chapters can be edited as necessary.
Next steps
If enabled, Zoom AI Companion will automatically examine the end of the recording and look for cues to identify any next steps for you. You can keep the next steps as part of the recording, edit as necessary, and share them with others.
Meeting coach
If enabled, Zoom AI Companion can analyze and provide metrics on key factors in your meeting conversations, such as talk speed, talk-listen ratio, longest spiel (or monologue), filler word usage, and your patience in discussion. These metrics can be viewed when viewing a cloud recording after it has finished processing. Hosts and participants can only view their own metrics.
Zoom documentation: Using Smart Recording with AI Companion
Whiteboard
Zoom AI features are also available for use with the Whiteboard feature of Zoom. Users can have the AI Companion generate ideas, refine and extend existing content, and add objects to a canvas with just one click.
Enable whiteboard content generation with Zoom AI
To enable or disable the ability to generate content on whiteboard using Zoom AI:
- Sign in to brown.zoom.us > Settings > AI Companion (direct link)
- Under Whiteboard, click the Whiteboard content generation with AI Companion toggle to enable or disable it.
Generate whiteboard content with Zoom AI
- Create or open an existing whiteboard.
- In the left toolbar, click the AI Companion sparkle icon. The Whiteboard Content Generation prompt will appear.
- Enter a command in the prompt field or select from the list of suggested ideas.
- (optional) Click Refine Results to add additional constraints on the output to suit your needs.
- When you are satisfied with the generated content, click the checkmark icon.
Zoom documentation: Using Whiteboard Content Generation with AI Companion