On Wednesday at its Zoomtopia conference, Zoom launched a suite of new products. The centerpiece is an upgraded AI companion designed to work across different meeting applications. New capabilities include the ability to add your own notes, AI-powered meeting scheduling, and the introduction of AI avatars that resemble users. With these features, the company aims to compete directly with specialized meeting startups and broader productivity suites.
Zoom has long provided an AI bot to record and transcribe its own meetings. However, it now faces competition from cross-application meeting notetakers like Read AI, Otter, Fireflies, Granola, and Circleback, which have made significant progress. To address this, Zoom is enabling its AI companion to work on other platforms such as Google Meet and Microsoft Teams. It is also introducing a feature to take notes during in-person meetings.
The company is taking inspiration from Granola by allowing users to jot down their own notes during meetings and then use AI to expand and structure those notes later. Zoom is adding a cross-platform search function so users can retrieve information from across both Google and Microsoft’s ecosystems.
New calendar-related features are also on the way. The AI Companion will help users find time slots that work for all attendees. It can also suggest meetings you can skip through a new “free up my time” request. Calendar tool Clockwise launched a similar tool last year to resolve meeting conflicts.
The company is rolling out proactive meeting recommendations, including suggested tasks and agenda items for meeting preparation, as well as a group AI assistant designed for teams.
Zoom will also introduce photorealistic avatars to its platform, a concept it has discussed for some time. The company’s CEO, Eric Yuan, used an avatar during a recent quarterly call. These avatars are designed to mimic your actions on video and are intended for use when you are not “camera-ready.” However, there are acknowledged deepfake risks associated with the misuse of such personas, which could lead corporate IT departments to disable the feature. It is expected to be available to consumers by the end of the year.
The update introduces the ability for hosts to use Zoom Clips, its asynchronous video tool, alongside AI avatars to greet people in waiting rooms and explain the purpose of a meeting. AI will also power new live translation features.
Furthermore, Zoom is launching an upgraded web interface that features its AI companion more prominently. Other AI-powered features are being added, including a writing assistant to draft emails and documents and a deep research tool. Zoom will also allow for the creation of custom AI agents with support for Model Context Protocol (MCP), support higher bit rates and 60fps for meetings, and introduce a new Zoom video management tool to manage video assets.