Zoom AI - Review of Capabilities
Let's talk about Zoom AI. Zoom has released AI capabilities for all users on paid plans. The AI-powered features are focused on transcription capabilities, helping you to make more of your meetings.
If you are a regular user and subscriber to Zoom, here’s the lowdown in plain English:
Zoom AI Meeting and Event Features – the Promised Blurb
AI-Powered Transcription: Provides real-time transcripts of your meetings and events, with the bonus of a searchable version afterwards. No more scribbling notes or struggling to remember key points.
AI-Powered Summarization: Zoom AI can take your meeting highlights and action items, wrap them up in a neat summary, and hand them over to you. That way, you can save time and stay right on track.
AI-Powered Highlights: Forget sifting through hours of meeting recordings! Zoom AI picks out the most important bits and creates a highlight reel for you to share. Great for quick recaps or making promo content.
The tested reality of Zoom AI
- The real-time transcripts in Zoom AI is not yet a thing (for everyone as of yet!). It does have a great feature that allow you to query the discussion with a catch or questions, but there wasn’t a full-blown transcript to access during the meeting.
- After the meeting, it took about 5 minutes to get the summary. The summary was sometimes quite inaccurate. I suppose that would be my Australian accent but on one instance, according to the summary I was talking about Germans when in fact the conversation I had was about Zoom AI capabilities.
- I didn’t receive a transcript at all. This feature does not seem to be rolled out to everyone. The promotional video on the Zoom website indicates a video recording with timestamps, but this was not available at the time of testing.
- Once started, there is a pop up that allows you to catch up on the meeting or to ask questions of what’s been discussed to date. Very handy if you’re late to the meeting. This was pretty accurate.
- To access the summary you need to navigate to the left hand side menu after the meeting is over. A version is also emailed to you. The summary took about 5 minutes to appear.
Comparison notes
I currently use Fathom. It’s an excellent transcription tool, these were my observations.
- The summary needed to be started separately from the Zoom AI companion – which gave on-the-fly summaries and query capability.
- The summary took about 5 minutes to appear versus Fathom which appears literally within moments of ending the meeting.
- There is no full transcript – assuming this is coming or only available on higher plans (I’m on the Pro) but the documentation on the Zoom site is not at all clear on this.
So all in all, a promising start, but I wouldn’t swap it out for my existing favourite meeting transcription tool.
Use cases identified
- Great for team meetings – particularly if you’re late!
- Great for summaries which would be a time saver. But as a consultant, a full transcript is also requirements I would have said, so until the transcript capability is tested, no comment.
Additional features for higher plans
There are additional features, but there are only available on the Business Plus plan (ie. currently au $347.50 pa / per user)
- AI-Powered Call Transcription: Just like with meetings, Zoom AI can transcribe your phone calls in real time and give you a searchable transcript. No more frantic note-taking during important calls.
- AI-Powered Call Summarization: If you’re using Zoom to make calls, you can use it to do summaries, of the key takeaways and next steps.
- AI-Powered Translation: Probably not a high demand for the average small business person, but for those with global teams or events with international guests, Zoom AI can translate in real time.
To enable Zoom AI
You need to be logged on, and your meeting started. It didn’t work to start with before I realised that I needed to be logged on to enable.
When I did enable it, all participants were notified of the AI tool being activated.
Interested in other AI tools? We have a list of the best suited to small business (and small budgets) which we are always adding to.
All in all, would we recommend it? Not yet. Find an alternative such as Fathom.
Happy Zooming! 🚀👩💻👨💼
