AI for Video Conferencing

2023. Zoom partners with Anthropic to bring Claude chatbot to Zoom products



With the increasing prominence of generative AI, Zoom has recognized the importance of partnering with Language Model (LLM) companies to navigate the evolving AI landscape. In line with this strategy, Zoom has recently announced its collaboration with Anthropic, a partnership that will involve leveraging Anthropic's Claude chatbot on the Zoom platform, initially focusing on the Zoom Contact Center. The objective of this partnership is to enhance customer support by providing more accurate responses while minimizing instances where the models generate fictional answers in the absence of the correct response. Zoom plans to continue collaborating with the Anthropic model and gain a deeper understanding of its workings. Eventually, the intention is to incorporate this technology into other Zoom products. It is important to note that there is currently no specific timeline for the introduction of Anthropic-based functionality to the market. However, Zoom remains committed to ongoing development in this area.


2023. Zoom announces AI features that act as your personal assistant



Video conferencing provider Zoom announced new additions to its AI-powered tool Zoom IQ. The new features leverage OpenAI's Large Language Model, or LLM, to summarize meetings, generate recaps, and draft chat and email responses. On the heels of announcements from Microsoft, Google, and Slack, Zoom is the latest major productivity tool to get the AI treatment. Zoom IQ already uses AI to give users meeting information through chapters, highlights from recordings, and action items. But it is taking it a step further by integrating OpenAI's powerful generative AI model. If you're late to a meeting, Zoom IQ can summarize in real time what you've missed and ask questions for you. Using text prompts, it can generate brainstorms using Zoom's whiteboard tool.

2023. Zoom is adding new features to compete with Slack, Calendly, Google and Microsoft



Zoom is expanding its offerings to compete with a range of companies, including Slack, Calendly, Google, and Microsoft, by introducing new features such as AI-powered meeting summaries, prompt-based email responses, and whiteboard generation, in addition to video "Huddles" and a meeting scheduler. Zoom aims to encourage users to shift more of their work tasks to its platform, and as such, it is making its email and calendar clients available to everyone. The company had been testing these tools since last year as part of a broader push beyond meetings. Furthermore, Zoom is offering hosted email and calendar services with end-to-end encryption protection and custom domains for paid users, which could serve as an alternative to Microsoft Exchange and Google Workspace for businesses.


2022. Google Meet gets automatic meeting transcriptions



Google is bringing automatic meeting transcriptions to its Meet video conferencing service. Until now, you needed a third-party service like Otter to record and transcribe your call for you. Now it’s a built-in service. The new feature is now available for meetings in English, with support for French, German, Spanish and Portuguese coming in 2023. Microsoft Teams, of course, started offering a similar feature for meetings in English more than a year ago. Given Google’s experience with other speech-to-text services like its Assistant or the Android Recorder app, it’s a bit odd that it took this long to add this to Meet, but better late than never.


2022. AI-powered videoconferencing platform Headroom raises $9M



Headroom, a startup developing AI-powered software to make meetings ostensibly more efficient, has raised $9M. Headroom uses AI to power features like automatic transcripts and meeting summaries, which remain indexable after meetings with search filters for attendees, notes and topics. The platform offers full meeting replays and auto-generated highlight reels with key moments and action items, plus AI-powered upscaling and quick reactions like “thumbs up” and “wave” that participants can use during meetings. But one of the more unique things about Headroom is its extensive analytics capabilities. The app tries to quantify “real-time meeting energy” by analyzing video, audio and text of and from various attendees. It even tracks eye movements and hand and head poses, attempting to figure out the sentiment in a person’s exchanges.


2022. Otter.ai challenger Airgram raises $10M to transcribe and time your video calls



There’re plenty of tools out there competing to help people make their video calls breezier. Some, like voice transcription service Otter.ai, have been getting a boost from the COVID-19 pandemic and pulling in handsome investments. Now a brave new player called Airgram is charging into the race. Aside from transcribing Zoom, Google Meet, and Microsoft Teams calls into sharable and editable text, Airgram also wants to help people keep their meetings on track by letting users project their meeting agenda onto the screen with a timer that reminds them not to run over time.


2022. Zoom launches AI-powered features aimed at sales teams



Zoom has announced Zoom IQ for Sales, a product that uses AI to analyze sales meetings and deals to provide insights. It’s the company’s first explicit foray into sales automation software. In many ways, Zoom IQ for Sales is an outgrowth of Zoom’s increasing investments in AI. Zoom last May introduced an AI-powered feature that shows highlights from recorded meetings, automatically selecting the “best” parts of meetings based on keywords from audio transcriptions. The company more recently acquired Kites, a startup specializing in real-time translation and transcription.


2020. CommonGround raises $19M to rethink online communication



CommonGround, a startup developing technology for what its founders describe as “4D collaboration,” is announcing that it has raised $19 million in funding. They are trying to build online collaboration software that more fully captures the nuances of in-person communication, and actually improves on face-to-face conversations in some ways (hence the 4D moniker). Think of it as beyond video,” using technology like computer vision and graphics.


2020. Huddl.ai wants to bring more intelligence to online meetings



Huddl.ai is a startup that wants to bring a dose of artificial intelligence to online meeting technology. It uses AI tools to transcribe the meeting, pull out the salient points and help users understand what happened without poring over notes to find the key information in a long session. While current solutions (Zoom, Cisco WebEx, Google Meet and Microsoft Teams) simply give you a link to a cloud room and everyone involved clicks and enters. Huddl wants to bring some more structure to that whole process.


2018. GoToMeeting added AI transcription, Amazon Alexa integration



LogMeIn has updated its GoToMeeting video and audio conference platform with new features that include a text chat function, AI transcription service and integration with Amazon’s Alexa voice assistant. The Business Messaging feature lets employees chat one-to-one or in groups with each other or with external clients using the new GoToMeeting desktop application or a standalone mobile app. Users can jump from a message thread directly into a video or audio conference with one click. The Smart Meeting Assistant transcribes meeting audio, storing the text in the cloud for subsequent sharing. This means that meeting attendees won’t need to worry about taking notes and can focus on discussions with colleagues.