Transform Your Virtual Meetings with Zoom AI Companion

A feature on Zoom can help Duke users summarize meetings, track action items and catch up on missed details

Have you joined a Zoom meeting late and wanted to find out what you’ve missed?

After a long, complex virtual meeting, could you have used a detailed summary afterward to make sure you didn’t miss anything?

Zoom users across ��ţӰ�� and ��ţӰ�� Health System can now get help with these situations and more with the new Zoom AI Companion, a generative-AI digital assistant.

The feature, ’s Office of Information Technology (OIT), uses AI to produce summaries of Zoom meetings, including participant action items and next steps. The AI Companion also enhances Zoom recordings on playback with highlights and smart chapters.

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“This is a very powerful tool,” said Debbie Suggs, a Senior IT Analyst with Duke OIT and one of Duke’s Zoom experts. “It’s really cool and I’m fascinated by what people will be able to do with this.”

Prior to offering the AI Companion to Duke users, Duke’s and other leaders analyzed and approved the security of the tool, which is automatically available for users who access Zoom when signed into .

To activate the feature during a meeting, the host of the meeting must click on the AI Companion icon in the menu bar at the bottom of the Zoom window. Prior to activating the AI companion, it’s recommended that meeting hosts ask permission to do so from all participants.

There are three main capabilities available that can help users get more from their meetings with the AI Companion.

Ask Questions

Duke OIT Media Architect and Senior Producer for Academic Media Production Stephen Toback.

Once the host activates the AI Companion, all meeting participants will see a dialogue box on the right side of their meeting window offering the opportunity to ask the AI Companion questions. These questions – users can write their own questions or click buttons with common queries such as “Catch me up” and “Was my name mentioned? – are only seen by the participant asking and can help clarify any meeting details that were missed or unclear.

“If you join a meeting late, this allows you to ask ‘What did I miss?’” said Duke OIT Media Architect and Senior Producer for Academic Media Production Stephen Toback, who helped test the AI Companion. “Then it gives you a quick summary of what everyone has been talking about.”

Create Meeting Summaries

Perhaps the most valuable feature of the AI Companion are the post-meeting summaries that are made available to hosts, who can share them with participants. Hosts can also share the summaries with people who are unable to attend a meeting.

Around 10 to 15 minutes after a meeting where the AI Companion is activated, hosts are alerted by email that the summary is ready. The summaries, which are stored in the host’s Zoom web client, give recaps of everything covered in the meetings and list specific action items discussed by participants for follow-up.

OIT experts recommend proofreading the summaries, which can be shared as links, because AI can occasionally misrepresent discussions, misspell names when spoken, and can’t identify speakers when multiple people are sharing a Zoom window. Summaries are automatically deleted after 30 days.

Toback said he recently used the summary feature for a complex, hour-long meeting about project management software and was impressed with the thorough and concise summary.

“I always prided myself in writing exceptional meeting summaries, I’d write everything down, what my action items are, what are my to-dos,” Toback said. “Zoom absolutely knocked this out of the park.”

Get Smart Recordings

When the AI Companion is activated during a live meeting, and the host also turns on Zoom’s meeting recording function, the resulting Smart Recordings can be useful.

In order to activate the Smart Recordings feature, Zoom users must first log into their Zoom client portal, click on “Settings” in the menu on the left and, under the “AI Companion” tab, activate the “Smart Recordings” option.

The Smart Recordings, which are stored on the cloud and available in the host’s Zoom client, will be broken down into chapters based on discussion topics and have segments of the meeting available as quick shareable highlights. There is also a “Meeting Coach” option which provides hosts metrics about how much time they spent talking and listening, how quickly they spoke and what filler words they used the most.

“This may help people learn how to be more efficient in their meeting times and look out for when they might be monopolizing the conversation,” Suggs said. “The meeting coach can tell you if you’re talking over people or if you’re letting them finish what they’re saying.”

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