Zoom announces a number of new AI-enabled features, including the ability to create videos using 'your own AI-generated avatar'

Zoom, a company that provides video conferencing services, announced new features at its annual event, Zoomtopia, held on October 9, 2024, that will be useful for business, including the ability to have AI summarize the contents of meetings and chats, and the ability to create videos with your own AI-generated avatar.

Zoom introduces AI Companion 2.0 and the ability to customize AI Companion with a new add-on | Zoom - Zoom

https://news.zoom.us/zoom-introduces-ai-companion-2-0/

Zoomtopia 2024: Unveiling AI-first work platform innovations | Zoom - Zoom
https://news.zoom.us/zoomtopia-2024-unveiling-ai-first-work-platform-innovations/

Zoom's custom AI avatar tool may come with risks | TechCrunch
https://techcrunch.com/2024/10/09/zooms-custom-ai-avatar-tool-may-come-with-risks/

Zoom will let AI avatars talk to your team for you - The Verge
https://www.theverge.com/2024/10/9/24266007/zoom-ai-avatars-clips-talk-for-you

As remote work and learning become more common, Zoom has grown as a company that provides video conferencing services. In addition to video conferencing services, the company also offers other services such as Zoom Workplace , a collaboration platform with chat, email, schedule management, memo, and video sharing functions, and AI Companion , a business efficiency tool that uses generative AI.

At Zoomtopia 2024, AI Companion 2.0 was announced, an AI personal assistant that further improves users' workflow. AI Companion 2.0 is available from the side panel of Zoom Workplace and has a variety of features, including:

- AI Companion suggests what to write in chats, documents, calendars, emails, etc.
-Collect information from the entire Zoom Workplace, information from Gmail, Google Calendar, files uploaded from Microsoft Office and Google Docs, etc.
- Generate next step tasks from meeting summaries.
- Summarize unread messages in Zoom Team Chat channels to keep you up to date on conversations.
- Summarize email threads using Zoom Mail.

As you can see from the screenshot below, AI Companion 2.0 summarizes the content of a Zoom meeting, making it easy for people who weren’t in the meeting to understand what was discussed.

AI Companion 2.0 is scheduled to be available at no additional cost to Zoom paid user accounts from late October 2024. However, AI Companion 2.0 may not be available in some regions or industries.

Zoom also offers a 'Custom AI Companion' to customize AI Companion to meet specific needs. This extends the capabilities of AI Companion, allowing you to access data across third-party apps such as Atlassian and Glean, add your organization's own knowledge collections, and analyze user interactions on Zoom to set personal benchmarks and goals.

In addition, it was announced that Zoom Clip, Zoom's video editing function, will also have the ability to create message videos using AI-generated avatars. Users can create an AI avatar that looks like them using a video of themselves, and have the AI avatar speak according to a prepared script.

Below is an example of an AI avatar generated by Zoom's custom AI Companion. Zoom claims that the avatar's movements are synchronized with the voice generated from the script. It is also possible to create videos using preset AI avatars and voices in Zoom.

Zoom Chief Product Officer Sumita Hasim told Tech Crunch that the AI-generated custom avatars are designed to let people chat with colleagues asynchronously in a faster, more productive way. 'Avatars save users valuable time and effort recording videos, allowing us to scale up video production,' Hasim said.

AI-generated avatars pose a risk of deepfakes, but Zoom claims to have built in numerous safeguards, including advanced authentication and watermarks. 'We will continue to review and add safeguards as necessary, and we will make it clear when a video is generated with an avatar,' Hasheem said.

Custom AI Companion will cost $12 (about 1,800 yen) per user per month and will be available for purchase in the first half of 2025. Some features will also be available in preview within the next few months.