Six AI Companion features you should know about and try right now

There are a lot of quotes attributed to Albert Einstein, arguably one of the greatest minds in history. He was once asked if he knew the speed of sound offhand. While he reportedly replied “[I do not] carry such information in my mind since it is readily available in books,” it generally gets reduced to “Never memorize what you can just look up.” Though the merits of this advice depend greatly on the situation, harnessing the ability to look something up is undoubtedly one of the more useful aspects of modern technology.

When we added the Zoom AI Companion panel to the Workplace app, we wanted to make it easily available to anyone. It’s always a single click away in Zoom Workplace or a Zoom Meeting. At the top right corner of Zoom Workplace, you’ll see the AI Companion icon   nestled right between your profile icon and the calendar sidebar icon. When you click AI Companion, you’ll get a whole side panel dedicated to AI Companion. What’s more, this panel will change depending on what Zoom product you’re currently using, whether that’s Team Chat, Mail, Docs, and more.

We have a whole use case library devoted to how you can use AI Companion, but here are some of our favorites. 

No, we’re not talking about asking questions to other people in the meeting. Sometimes, the conversation is going so well that you either can’t find a spot to interject or you don’t want to. Instead of starting a side conversation in the chat, you have an opportunity to get the information you need without interrupting the flow of the conversation. No one else in your meeting can see the questions you type in the AI Companion side panel.

1. When in a Zoom Meeting where AI Companion is active, at the bottom, click AI Companion.
2. In the side panel that appears:
• Enter a question about the conversation taking place.
• Enter a question that you’d normally put into a search engine like Google, Bing, or DuckDuckGo.

You can also use the AI Companion side panel in Zoom Workplace anytime to search the web for answers.

We’ve all been there. You had a meeting a week ago–wait, two weeks ago? It’s hard to say. You remember what it was about and who it was with, but you can’t find it on your calendar and you can’t recall what the outcomes were or an answer to a particular question from that meeting. Stop hunting through your overpacked calendar. Instead, have AI Companion do the digging for you.

1. In Zoom Workplace, at the top, click Calendar.
2. If the AI Companion side panel is not already open, go to the top right and click the AI Companion diamond .
3. In the bottom text box, enter something like “When did [NAME] and I last discuss [TOPIC]?”

From there, AI Companion will search your available transcripts for the topic and who you were talking with. You might finally remember the meeting was three weeks ago on a Thursday, not a Tuesday. With AI Companion, it doesn’t matter. You have what you need when you need it.

You aren’t limited to entering text in the AI Companion side panel. You can also attach files from Google Drive, Microsoft OneDrive, or locally from your device. Ask for a summary, the important takeaways, or even the difference between the two documents, like comparing the latest version of a contract to the previous one.

1. In Zoom Workplace, if the AI Companion side panel is not already open, go to the top right and click the AI Companion diamond .
2. At the bottom, click Attach file  and choose your source.
3. After you choose your file, click Attach file  again and upload a file you want to compare.
4. In the text box, enter something like, “Summarize the difference between these two files.”

Your meetings are often rich in detail and discussion, a place where a lot of information gets shared. You can actually generate documents with just as much detail right in Zoom Docs. You might have to regularly relate certain aspects of your meeting to upper management or release reports to a wider audience. Take your treasure trove of meeting summaries and turn them into valuable documents that are easy to edit, share, and use.

1. In Zoom Workplace, at the top, click Docs and then Create from meetings.
2. In your new doc, choose a meeting with an AI Companion meeting summary.
3. Edit the results, or use AI Companion to return different parts of the meeting summary, like the action items, or more detail on a specific topic.

For those of us who get pulled into a meeting last minute, or get an updated document right before we’re supposed to meet about it, we don’t always have the time to be as up-to-speed as we’d like to be. That’s when you can depend on AI Companion to give you the highlights so you can hit the ground running.

1. In Zoom Workplace, if the AI Companion side panel is not already open, go to the top right and click the AI Companion diamond .
2. At the bottom, click Attach file  and choose your source.
3. After you have selected your file, enter a request like “Give me the main takeaways” or “What do I need to know from this?”

If you get a lot of messages in Zoom Team Chat, you know that while it’s nice to have everything organized, sometimes you need some help catching up. When you’re out of the office for a significant amount of time or pulled into a discussion midway through, you can have AI Companion summarize the entire chat channel so far in the side panel.

1. In Zoom Workplace, at the top, click Team Chat.
2. In the left sidebar, open the chat or channel you want to summarize.
3. At the top right, to open the side panel, click the AI Companion diamond .

In the text field, enter “Summarize this chat channel” or at the bottom of the side panel, click Summarize recent messages.

Spend enough time looking for the answer, and you’ll probably find it. But it takes time to do a lengthy deep dive into the many emails, chats, and meetings that you have at your disposal. And no matter how much effort someone puts in, there’s just not always the time. So take back some of that time with AI Companion.

Discover even more ways to use AI Companion in your everyday work.