UW-Madison Zoom Workplace - Getting Started with Zoom AI Companion
Zoom AI companion is a collection of AI Models that provide a series of auto-generated reports such as meeting summaries, cloud recording highlights, and more to increase meeting productivity and efficiency.
This feature is disabled by default to allow for an opt-in experience. This allows the host to control how and when AI Companion features are used during their meetings.
Zoom does not use any of your audio, video, chat, screen sharing, attachments or other communications-like customer content (such as poll results, whiteboard and reactions) to train Zoom’s or its third-party artificial intelligence models.
Topics
- What can Zoom AI Companion do?
- How can I enable Zoom AI Companion?
- How can I use Zoom AI Companion?
- How can I tell if a meeting has Zoom AI Companion enabled?
- Campus guidance
- Resources
What can Zoom AI Companion do?
Zoom AI Companion is a generative AI assistant integrated into the Zoom platform, designed to enhance productivity and collaboration across various features like Meetings, Team Chat, and more. It offers a suite of tools that automate tasks and provides support before, during, and after a meeting.
Key functionalities include:
In-meeting
- generate meeting summaries and action items
- allow participants to ask in-meeting questions to quickly catch up on what they missed
- create smart recordings with highlights and chapters
Outside of meeting
- help draft chat messages
- summarize long chat threads
- assist with content generation on Zoom Whiteboards
- chat with AI Companion 2.0 using the persistent side panel in the desktop app
Please keep in mind:
- The host is the default recipient for meeting summaries and controls who receives a copy.
- 1:1 conversations with the AI Companion are not visible by the meeting host or participants and is not included in the meeting summary.
- 1:1 conversations cannot be saved.
- 1:1 conversations with AI Companion are not available in breakout rooms.
- AI Companion is not available for webinars at this time.
How can I enable/disable Zoom AI Companion?
This step controls which Zoom AI Companion features are available in the Zoom desktop client during a meeting. These settings need to be enabled before a meeting starts. Changes made to the account settings during a meeting will not appear immediately. A new meeting will need to be started to see account setting changes.
- Log in to https://uwmadison.zoom.us
- Enter your NetID credentials
- Select Settings in the left menu
- Select the AI Companion tab on the top menu
- Enable preferred settings as needed.
The following AI Companion features are not available: Zoom Docs, Zoom Tasks, and Zoom Phone.
How can I use Zoom AI Companion meetings?
Zoom AI Companion generates a temporary transcript during a meeting when the host enables at least one of the following settings in the Zoom web and desktop application:
AI Companion Side Panel
The AI Companion side panel is available in the Zoom desktop app. When enabled, you can create a draft agenda for upcoming meetings, summarize or ask questions about past meetings, summarize new messages in a chat channel, summarize key topics within a chat channel, and even search the web to catchup on the latest new related to a specific topic.
Meeting Summary
Meeting summary provides the host a summary of what was discussed during their meeting. The summary may include topics such as action items, discussion highlights, decisions made, and more.
A summary is generated after the meeting ends. Access to the summary may not be immediately available for review while it is being generated. The summary can be modified, shared, and deleted by the host.
Note: The default retention time frame for meeting summaries is 150 days. When a meeting summary is deleted, is it not recoverable. Zoom admins do not have the ability to recover deleted meeting summaries. Meeting summaries can be manually deleted before 150 days, if needed.
Ask Meeting Questions
Ask Meeting Questions allows participants to interact with Zoom AI Companion in a chat bot format. Zoom AI Companion can answer questions such as, “was my name mentioned?”, “catch me up”, provide a summary of the meeting up to the current point, and more.
Note: Your 1:1 conversation with the AI Companion is not viewable by the host, meeting participants, or included in the meeting summary. The conversation cannot be saved. It is gone and irrecoverable when the meeting ends.
Smart Recording with AI Companion
Smart Recording with AI Companion can be used to generate a mix of information depending on the host’s settings. It can create a set of meeting highlights, chapters, and next steps. Smart recording can even provide "coaching" through the use of host/participant metrics.
Note: The default retention time frame for recordings is 150 days. Smart recordings can be manually deleted before 150 days, if needed.
The meeting transcript generated by the AI Companion is not accessible to the host or participants. It is used as a temporary reference to generate a meeting summary, answer questions when asked, and organize/analyze a cloud recording for productivity purposes.
If the host does not enable at least one of the settings above, Zoom AI Companion will not create a transcript during the meeting.
How can I tell if a meeting has Zoom AI Companion enabled?
There are a few ways to tell if a meeting has Zoom AI Companion enabled:
- Participants only - A disclaimer may pop up when joining the meeting.
- Host only - If you see an option to stop AI Companion features in the desktop client toolbar, then AI Companion is enabled.
- Host and participants - When AI Companion is enabled, there is a sparkle indicator(✨) in the upper-right corner of the meeting. If you click on the indicator, it will tell you what AI Companion features are enabled.
Campus guidance
The following resources are general guidance on AI tool usage:
Note: Please consult your IT department if you have additional questions on AI usage. Your department may have specific guidelines for your use case.