Zoom this week announced expanded Zoom AI Companion capabilities for its regulated healthcare and education customers at its virtual event, Zoomtopia 2023.

WHY IT MATTERS
Users can now manage their AI Companion settings for meetings, team chat, whiteboard and mail all in one place in the Zoom web portal.

Zoom customers can expect to see AI Companion throughout the entire platform, according to the announcement Tuesday.

The real-time digital assistant capabilities can be used in meetings, team chat, phone, email and its whiteboard tools, with more to come on the video conferencing vendor's road map.

Health system clients can now generate and organize ideas in Zoom Whiteboard with the benefit of AI summarization, the company said. These users will also soon get help from AI Companion for generating and categorizing ideas and, by spring 2024, harness their whiteboard content to generate images and populate templates.

When enabled by administrators and users, Zoom Meeting video now offers auto-generated highlights and "smart chapters," along with summaries and next steps.

During a meeting, if enabled by the meeting host, late attendees can use the in-meeting AI Companion panel to ask real-time questions about what they missed and receive AI-generated answers.

AI additions in Zoom Chat, Zoom Mail, Zoom Notes and Zoom Phone incorporate conversation summaries, suggested replies and integrated meeting summaries, Zoom said.

The company said it uses a federated approach to AI incorporating its own large language models, along with third-party models – Meta Llama 2, OpenAI and Anthropic and others.

Pre-meeting preparation features are also being developed. They'll leverage AI Companion to surface knowledge from meetings, chats, whiteboards, emails and Zoom documents – another new tool announced at this week's virtual conference – and, with users’ permission, from third-party applications, the company said.

Users may also soon have the ability to receive real-time feedback on their presence in meetings, as well as coaching on their conversational and presentation skills, Zoom said.

"Zoom is continuing to invest in AI throughout our platform and taking a leadership stance in AI technology by being transparent that communications-like customer content will not be used to train Zoom’s AI models or its third-party artificial intelligence models," Mahesh Ram, head of AI applications at Zoom, said in the statement.

THE LARGER TREND
In response to assumptions about changes in its terms of service, Zoom announced in August that it does not use any customer audio, video, chat, screen-sharing, attachments or other customer content – such as poll results, whiteboards or reactions – to train its LLMs or other third-party models.

In the blog post response, Zoom addressed concerns about HIPAA-protected conversations on the platform.

"Different contracts exist for customers that buy directly from us, including enterprises and customers in regulated verticals like education and healthcare, and updates to the online terms of service do not impact these customers," Smita Hashim, Zoom chief product officer, wrote.

In early September, the company also announced that its integrated Companion AI is turned off by default.

The platform is well used throughout the healthcare ecosystem for virtual care and other digital services. Laura Mrazik, manager of telehealth at MaineGeneral Health, told Healthcare IT News earlier this year that Zoom is helping MaineGeneral Health boost its telehealth success.

"We appreciate Zoom’s ability for the client organization to control settings at the account level, internally, and the application’s flexibility to meet the needs of different use cases," she said.

"Zoom’s support portal has both a forum to ask other clients questions, and a library of instructions for how our own team can troubleshoot or make configuration changes appropriately."

ON THE RECORD
"With the incredible capabilities of Zoom AI Companion, knowledge workers can have the power of large language models in their pocket, without breaking the bank," Ram said in the announcement. "Zoom AI Companion is built to assist with everyday tasks, including whiteboard capabilities, providing a boost of productivity whenever it’s needed."

Andrea Fox is senior editor of Healthcare IT News.
Email: afox@himss.org
Healthcare IT News is a HIMSS Media publication