Zoom Will Provide AI Features for Free to Paid Users

Zoom, the popular video conferencing service, announced that artificial intelligence (AI) features will be provided at no extra cost to paying customers. The company believes including AI functions in paid plans will give them an advantage over competitors. Zoom uses a "federated" multi-model AI design with several large language models, including their own and third-party models like OpenAI and Anthropic.

Zoom's AI tool, AI Companion, offers features such as summarizing meetings, suggesting chat responses, and summarizing unread chats. It is available for free to paying customers. Zoom does not use any customer data to train their AI models or third-party models they use. They use public data, purchased data, and data they generate themselves.

Ricky Kapur, Zoom's Asia-Pacific head, said larger companies likely won't provide every employee access if the cost is too high. He said Zoom has seen "accelerated" AI projects from paying customers because the features are free.

Zoom introduced AI-powered tools like AI Companion and Zoom Docs. Zoom Docs, releasing next year, is a "next-generation document workspace" with "modern collaboration tools." It is integrated into Zoom and available in Meetings, Team Chat, and Zoom apps.

AI Companion, once called Zoom IQ, is an AI assistant helping automate tedious tasks. It can suggest chat responses based on user prompts and summarize unread chats. It also provides meeting summaries, noting key topics and who said what. AI Companion is free for Zoom subscription plans, starting at $149.90 per year.

With Zoom Docs and AI Companion, users will get summaries of their last five meetings and action items, said Graeme Geddes, Zoom's chief growth officer. Over 220,000 users have used AI Companion since September. It now supports 33 languages, including Chinese, Korean, and Japanese.

Geddes said Zoom's AI approach, using multiple large language models like their own, Meta Llama 2, OpenAI GPT 3.5 and 4, and Anthropic Claude 2, leads to better quality, lower latency, and lower costs. CTO Xuedong Huang said their "federated" AI approach improved quality over single-model systems like OpenAI GPT-3.5 Turbo by 99% vs 93% in their tests.

Zoom will not use customer data to train their AI models or third-party models, said Geddes. Following privacy concerns, Zoom promised not to use customer data from free or paid services to train AI models. Zoom does not use customer audio, video, chat, attachments, or other data to train models. They use public data, purchased data, and generated data.

Take advantage of Zoom's AI features for free and upgrade your team's productivity and collaboration today!