Zoom has today launched a new function for its AI Companion, a generative AI digital assistant, to add to its suite of capabilities. This latest innovation is a Whiteboard feature, designed to facilitate smoother and more efficient brainstorming and organisation of ideas. The additional Whiteboard function bolsters the array of services the Zoom AI Companion can provide, which now total seven, and a promise of more to come.

The new Whiteboard capability allows users to generate ideas on a digital whiteboard and organise these ideas into categories, streamlining the brainstorming process and helping teams activate tasks more quickly. Aimed at improving productivity, the introduction of the Whiteboard feature also allows users to manage their AI Companion settings for Meetings, Team Chat, Whiteboard, and Mail all in one place in the web portal.

Speaking on the development, Mahesh Ram, head of AI applications at 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." He also illustrated the utility of Zoom AI Companion, saying, "knowledge workers can have the power of large language models in their pocket, without breaking the bank. Zoom AI Companion is built to assist with everyday tasks, providing a boost of productivity whenever it’s needed."

Multiple functions have already been deployed in Zoom's AI Companion, including for Zoom Meetings, enabling users to watch recordings faster, discretely submit queries during live sessions, and receive automated meeting summaries. Features for Zoom Team Chat include the ability to quickly draft messages based on chat context, and for the Zoom Mail function, AI-generated draft email suggestions are available.

Zoom has announced that it will continue to expand the capabilities of its AI Companion, revealing forthcoming features. These include the ability to interact with the Companion’s capabilities via a conversational interface, allowing it to understand the context of questions and provide support to users, as well as expeditiously detect meeting intent in Zoom Team Chat messages.

The AI Companion’s functionality will also extend to harness whiteboard content to generate images and populate whiteboard templates, in addition to providing automated meeting summaries. Furthermore, it will help to streamline the scheduling process and provide useful suggestions fast, such as to complete sentences and responses in chat messages.

Zoom, headquartered in San Jose, California, was founded in 2011. Its all-in-one intelligent collaboration platform is designed to centralise team chat, phone, meetings, smart recordings, whiteboard, and other solutions in one offering to facilitate modern collaboration and drive human innovation.