The VCU Zoom Blog

Announcements, Alerts, Tips and Pointers

Zoom’s AI Companion features including Meeting Summary, Smart Recordings and Meeting Questions are now available for use by VCU Zoom account members. By default, the features are turned off, but you can enable them from your account page at vcu.zoom.us.

In this post, you’ll find a brief overview of these new features, with links to more information.

Meeting Summary

When enabled, AI Companion uses artificial intelligence to create an editable summary of your meeting, to be delivered to you via email once the meeting ends. You can use the “Start Summary” option at any point in your meeting, or you can modify your account settings to have summaries begin automatically at the launch of each meeting. As a participant, you’ll see a notification whenever AI Companion features are in use. You’ll be be able to request the meeting host to start a Meeting Summary, or to turn it off.

More details and guides to using this feature are available via the Zoom Support site.

If you wish to enable Meeting Summaries for your account, log in at vcu.zoom.us, go to “Settings > AI Companion > Meeting > Meeting summary with AI Companion” and turn it on.

Meeting Questions

With the “Meeting Questions” feature enabled, participants who join a meeting late or have trouble keeping up can ask AI Companion questions about what they missed. For example, participants can ask whether various topics have already been discussed, what decisions might have been made, whether their name was mentioned, etc. and AI Companion will provide the answers without disrupting the meeting for others.

More details can be found on the Zoom Support site. When you enable “Meeting Questions” for your account, you can set it to allow participants to ask questions about any part of the meeting or restrict them to only asking questions about what’s happened since they joined the meeting. You may choose to make “Questions” available only to yourself as the host, or leave the feature disabled entirely (each AI Companion feature can be turned on or off independently of the others). You can enable and customize your the settings for this feature under “Settings > AI Companion > Meeting > Allow users to ask AI Companion questions about the meeting.”

Smart Recording

With the Smart Recording feature enabled, Zoom Cloud recordings can be labeled with “smart chapter” headings for easier review and/or have visual highlights added to mark points of particular interest (you can edit these highlights as needed). When enabled, a “Next Steps” feature can display a list of future action items inspired by the meeting discussion. There’s also an optional “Meeting Coach” feature analyzing how much time you spent talking as the host compared to the time you gave participants to respond, how fast you talked, how many “Um’s” and “Er’s” you used, etc., with the aim of helping you improve future meetings. If that doesn’t appeal to you, it’s easily disabled in your account settings.

To adjust your Smart Recording settings or disable the feature entirely, go to “Settings > AI Companion > Recording.” More details can be found at the Zoom Support Site.

Please note that in spite of any generic references you may see in the vendor documentation, no third-party AI services will be used to provide these features or to collect or store your data. VCU adheres to a Zoom-hosted models only (“ZMO”) plan that does not involve any other providers.

About Records Retention

Please note that in creating video recordings, summaries and transcriptions of your Zoom meetings, you are generating documents that may be subject to VCU’s Records Management Policies.  Please review these policies to ensure you’re taking the appropriate steps to store records, keeping in mind that storage on Zoom’s Cloud servers is only temporary. We’ve provided a few tips in this regard on the VCU Zoom information page.

Questions?

You may have questions about how all this works and how safe it is, so we’ve assembled a helpful online FAQ for your reference. If you don’t see the answer you need there, feel free as always to reach out to the VCU Zoom Support team at [email protected].

We’re hopeful these new features will significantly improve your Zoom meeting experience. While the decision to use them or not is entirely yours, we strongly encourage you to rely on AI Companion over any third-party AI note-taking applications, many of which could present data security concerns for you and the university.

Categories AI Companion, announcements, features, recordings