Click-click, click-click. That’s it the sound of someone taking meeting notes during a Zoom call, and it’s very annoying. Like caffeinated chipmunks, people sometimes don’t realize they’re screaming at a keyboard. However, someone should write down the action items and reminders.
That “person” does not have to be a person. Released last fall, Zoom’s new AI Companion feature—included with all paid Zoom subscriptions—is like having an assistant manager on every call. The bot can summarize the meeting, create action items, and tell you who spoke the most.
AI Companion uses extensive language models from OpenAI, Anthropic, and Meta but also trained itself by listening to thousands of meetings between Zoom employees, according to Smita Hashim, chief product officer at Zoom. (“For confidentiality, we do not use actual interviews from our clients for any training purposes,” he says.)
While AI Companion is powerful, it’s not always clear what you can do during a call or how the bot keeps track of time. I decided to hold several meetings and put Zoom’s AI assistant through a series of tests. I will explain how you can achieve these same results, giving you the best instructions to get you started. Also, I’ll include what the AI Friend can’t do—at the moment.
Summarize the Meeting
During the meeting, you can access the AI Companion by clicking the icon at the bottom of the main video window. (It looks like a shiny magic wand.) Zoom offers a few built-in prompts to get you started, such as “Summarize the meeting,” which lists several points based on what’s been discussed so far. AI Companion acts as a human host during meetings; you can have the bot create a whiteboard of ideas based on real-time conversation as a way to visualize the conversation.
In my tests, it was clear that the feature works best when people are clear and objective during a Zoom call. If you stick to the meeting plan, which covers the most important topics in a concise form, the summary is really useful. In one call it’s about a new website design, a summary that involves doing design work, prototyping, and testing. However, AI Companion didn’t always pick up on talking points. In a meeting to plan an overseas trip with family members, the conversation was unplanned, and the AI-generated summary I received later didn’t really make sense. Bots teach us how to live in their world, right? AI Companion works best if your meeting follows a well-defined structure.
Instead of a snapshot, you can also ask the AI Companion to “Hold me” or ask “Does anyone have action items?” The bot won’t summarize everything in the meeting but will mention a few high-level topics and takeaways. On the call about the vacation, the bot told me that my daughter Rachel had just talked about airplanes. When your mind wanders during a meeting, asking to be caught is incredibly helpful. Not that any of us ever do that in Zoom meetings, of course.