Zoom is modernizing and rebranding its AI-powered services, including the generative AI assistant formerly known as Zoom IQ, to remain competitive in the crowded videoconferencing industry.
The information follows an uproar over modifications to Zoom’s terms of service, which suggested that Zoom reserved the ability to train its AI tools and models using client videos. Zoom modified its policy to say that “communications-like” customer data won’t be utilized in teaching AI apps and services for Zoom or its external partners in reaction to the backlash.
Developers were recently urged to stop using Zoom because of the terms of service modifications by The Software Freedom Conservancy. This nonprofit organization offers assistance and legal counsel for open-source projects.
Zoom AI Friend
The relaunched Zoom IQ, now known as the AI Companion, utilizes the same combination of technologies as Zoom IQ: internal generative AI developed by Zoom and AI models from vendors including Meta, OpenAI, and Anthropic. However, it is now accessible in more Zoom ecosystem areas, such as Zoom Whiteboard, Zoom Team Chat, and Zoom Mail.
The fact that Zoom is receiving an AI Companion—a ChatGPT-like bot—is arguably the most significant development. Zoom will have a conversational interface in the spring of 2024 that will let users interact with the AI Companion directly, inquire about previous meetings and chats, and act on their behalf.
Users will be able to ask the AI Companion questions about the status of projects, for instance, and it will retrieve information from recorded meetings, chats, whiteboards, emails, papers, and even third-party apps. They can generate and submit support tickets, write answers to inquiries, and ask the AI Companion questions during a meeting to review the essential details. They will also be able to have the AI Companion summarize discussions, automatically selecting action items and surfacing the following steps, just like it was available with Zoom IQ.
Starting in the spring of 2019, the AI Companion will also teach users conversational and presentation skills and provide “real-time feedback” on their meeting presence.
Not all users are likely to appreciate this function, especially those suspicious of Zoom’s possible AI-related ulterior objectives. However, Zoom notes that an account owner or administrator can always turn off real-time feedback in addition to the AI Companion’s other features.
Users will soon (within a few weeks) be able to summarize conversation threads using the AI Companion in Zoom Team conversation, the messaging app from Zoom, a functionality that Zoom IQ also provided. (This reporter is dubious about AI’s ability to summarize, but I’ll reserve judgment until I see Zoom’s technology in action.)
By the beginning of 2024, users can plan meetings directly from chats and have auto-complete chat lines comparable to those offered by Microsoft Teams and Google Meet.
In a previously hinted-at feature, by spring 2024, Zoom Whiteboard, the company’s collaborative whiteboarding tool, will be able to generate graphics and fill templates thanks to the AI Companion. The image-generating model that will power this functionality has yet to be discovered. However, the outputs are assumed to be comparable to text-to-image programs like OpenAI’s DALL-E 2 and Midjourney. (Another question is whether content filters and bias mitigations of any kind will be present.)
Users of Zoom Mail, the company’s email client, will be able to access AI-generated email ideas through the AI Companion in the early fall, just like with Zoom IQ. Additionally, by the spring of 2024, Zoom users can summarize text message threads, calls via Zoom Phone’s VoIP service, and meetings in the platform’s note-taking software, Notes.
The side panel of the Zoom app will house many, if not all, of the AI Companion functions. Only for some users, though. Once they become live, only paying Zoom users will have access to them.
Zoom Revenue Booster
The sales assistant tool Zoom IQ for Sales is changing to Zoom Revenue Accelerator as part of Zoom’s second rebranding today.
When Zoom IQ for Sales first came out, it wasn’t warmly received by users, who claimed that the feature’s sentiment analysis algorithms were fundamentally incorrect. More than two dozen human rights organizations urged Zoom to abandon its plans to research “inaccurate” and “under-tested” technologies.
Zoom finally decided not to discontinue Zoom IQ for Sales. Instead, it changed the tool’s feature set away from sentiment analysis and toward more commonplace use cases, and it appears to do so still.
A “virtual coach” to replicate talks for onboarding and training sales team members was among the new features Zoom unveiled for Revenue Accelerator. Like other AI-powered sales training tools, the virtual coach can evaluate salespeople’s effectiveness when selling products using different sales approaches.
Additionally, deal risk signals are coming to Revenue Accelerator, enabling sales team members to send alerts if a deal has yet to advance in a predetermined amount of time using a rules-based engine. Discover Monthly, another upcoming tool, will monitor how rivals are referenced on calls and summarize the trends every month.
In the fourth quarter results for the 2023 fiscal year, Zoom reported its first quarterly loss of $108 million since 2018—a critical period for the tech behemoth. In February, Zoom fired over 1,300 employees, or 15% of its workforce, citing a post-pandemic decline in demand and heightened competition from Microsoft, Cisco, Webex, Slack, and other companies. When social distance rules made videoconferencing a necessity, one of the main winners from the pandemic was Zoom.
Zoom’s outlook for the April-ending quarter improved as the business tightened its belt. Zoom increased its annual revenue prediction to between $4.47 billion and $4.49 billion, up nearly 2% from between $4.44 billion and $4.46 billion, despite recording the worst quarterly growth at 3% and declining online revenue.
[Source of Information : Techcrunch.com]
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