If you’re unsure about a concept discussed in a meeting or have forgotten what the next steps were, just use Zoom AI Companion to help you out.

The artificial intelligence (AI) assistant creates meeting summaries with highlighted key points and discussion topics as a meeting progresses. These meeting summaries will separate each discussion topic by paragraphs, allowing participants to concisely review the materials covered and search for topics they might need clarification on. Hosts can decide who to share these summaries with and can edit them as needed for accuracy, tone, and better accessibility.

“Zoom AI Companion allows our users to save valuable time by summarizing meetings in a format that allows for easy review of important information, while also in a secure environment that is fully supported by UNLV IT,” said Mark Kasselhut, senior e-learning technology program manager for UNLV Information Technology.

AI Companion is available to all UNLV employee Zoom accounts and can be requested by participants if enabled by the host, who has the ability to select which AI Companion tools are available to those joining their meeting. By enabling certain features, hosts can reduce answering repeated questions and easily share information about the meeting’s content with a large group of participants. These features not only improve productivity after a meeting, but during one as well.

With AI Companion questions enabled, participants can privately ask AI Companion questions and receive generated responses based on the live transcription without having to interrupt the meeting. These questions may include clarifying a term or providing additional information on a topic being discussed.

After a meeting is finished, hosts can decide to share items that were enabled with AI Companion along with the meeting summaries. These can be items such as a link to the meeting’s full recording, transcription, and chat history for those who might want to review the information given.

AI Companion’s smart recordings also capture speaker identification and keyword detection during meetings, which makes reviewing these cloud-recorded Zoom meetings easier and more efficient. Similarly to regular Zoom Cloud recordings, hosts have the ability to edit transcriptions before being shared to correct any errors.

"These days, we know that our UNLV colleagues are busy. Providing our faculty, staff, and students tools to make their lives easier is a large focus of IT initiatives,” said Alethea Inns, instructional technology support specialist for UNLV Information Technology. “This is a small way to have a large impact on finding the content you need quickly.”  

With the introduction of AI Companion, third-party AI bots like Otter.ai are strongly discouraged from being used during live Zoom sessions in order to protect user data and privacy. These AI bots collect information about participants and hosts, such as names, emails, and meeting content, with no control over how it’s used and shared.

Zoom’s AI Companion is a UNLV-supported solution to these third-party AI bots that provides similar features and allows hosts to have control over meeting content, thereby protecting the data of those participating in meetings.

“Zoom’s AI Companion puts the control and responsibility of appropriate use in the hands of the meeting host,” Inns said. “This is important when it’s unclear what third-party bots do with meeting and participant data and content.”

Implementing the use of AI Companion into Zoom meetings is simple, safe, and effective. Not only does this new feature prioritize user’s privacy to ensure secure meetings, but it provides AI generative resources that help hosts and participants take advantage of their Zoom meetings.