At its annual Zoomtopia conference in San Jose, California, videoconferencing company Zoom today announced a range of new products and capabilities, including an AI-powered document application called Zoom Docs and an expanded list of capabilities offered by the company’s recently launched AI Companion — all aimed at offering enterprises a more complete collaboration and communications platform for hybrid work.
Alongside its standard document capabilities, Zoom Docs also offers project-tracking and wiki-building features that integrate with the Zoom platform and third-party apps. Users will be able to collaborate on documents by tagging colleagues to loop them into discussions, adding comments and threads to explain context, and assigning tasks and sharing documents. Layouts can be customized with elements including tablesand image blocks, and AI-powered functionality will allow users to view content summaries and search documents for relevant information.
Zoom says Zoom Docs, combined with Zoom’s recently announced AI Companion, the company’s generative AI digital assistant, can help boost the ideation process. Users can, for example, ask for help editing, or change the tone of document content, brainstorm, and summarize or query content. AI Companion can also pull in information across Zoom Meetings and Team Chat to streamline the way information is shared across Zoom.
“Let me be clear, this is so much more than your average document. It’s really a next generation way of collaborating built from the ground up with AI at its core,” said Theresa Larkin, global lead for UCaaS product marketing at Zoom. Zoom Docs is scheduled to be generally available in 2024.
The announcement shows that Zoom is taking measured steps to expand its product line, said Wayne Kurtzman, IDC Research vice president for collaboration and communities.
“As this is early in the emerging technology changes we are experiencing, this is also early in Zoom’s journey and promising for the future,” he said.
Zoom seeks to dampen AI controversies
Zoom also announced it would be expanding the capabilities offered by Zoom AI Companion.
At a press conference for press and analysts the week before Zoomtopia, Randel Maestre, who leads Zoom’s AI developer ecosystem and industry product marketing teams, sought to address some of the recent controversies faced by Zoom regarding whether it’s using user data for AI training.
“We do not use any customer audio, video, chat, screen sharing attachments, or other communications-like content such as poll results, whiteboards, or reactions to train Zoom’s AI or any third party AI model,” Maestre said.
He noted that Zoom provides administrator as well as account owner controls for the enablement of AI features that are turned off by default, in addition to offering controls to meeting hosts and participants.
Expanding Zoom AI Companion
Launched last month, Zoom AI Companion currently allows users to…
2023-10-05 15:00:04
Article from www.computerworld.com rnrn