AI Companion for Zoom

There is a relatively new feature for Zoom meetings which I tried out today.
It calls itself AI Companion. Its main fuction is to provide a written summary of the meeting which it creates from a temporary transcript which it makes as the meeting proceeds

In addition to the summaries it keeps track of action items and answers questions about things said in the meeeting.

The summary was sent to me by email when the meeting ended. It consists of 1250 words and is divided into 7 topics areas. Although there are some errors of understanding in the text it is a very fair summary of our meandering 1 hour informal meeting.

The summary could be useful for meeting organisers to send out to people who are unable to attend.
It should be vetted for accuracy but may be preferable to watching a long unedited video.

I will be looking at it to help with minutes of formal meetings.

Is using AI to record history just another step on the road to SkyNet?

Is using AI to record history just another step on the road to SkyNet?

Well, there’s now a record of exactly (within the limits of its understanding) what was said. The original (and maybe yours, you don’t say) will also have been tagged with who said it.

A “useful little service” for you.
A potential goldmine for data scrapers.

I will be looking at it to help with minutes of formal meetings.

What sort of formal meetings? If I was running a company I’d be very likely to want to take such meetings offline. Company “secrets” should remain within the company, and not be spewed god knows where in the cloud.
And yes, I’m quite aware that the place I work has outsourced everything to cloudy providers. At least I was able to help get one of them given the boot for passing around people’s personal email addresses ¹ by bluntly pointing out the company’s obligations ² under the GDPR.
I cannot object to the places the company chooses to share information (as it is deemed necessary for the administration of the company) because some of these places I’d trust about as far as I’d trust PayPal with my bank info.

¹ Only the management have work email. The rest of us have to provide our own.

² Just because an outfit says they are compliant doesn’t absolve the employer (as the data controller) from auditing this to verify it is correct. CNIL (French DPA) goes as far as to specify that “bon volonté” (but they said so) is not an acceptable excuse.

What sort of formal meetings?

Well they are not very formal. We (IBM Retiree Club Midlands) run a Zoom meeting every Monday morning. It is just old IBMers chatting about past glories, unit record machines, card punches and the like. A bit like Aldershot really. The meetings are open to anyone remotely connected to IBM and have been going for four years.

Once a month the meeting is declared formal and minutes are taken. The committee meeting is tasked with organising events and trips for the members.

People at the meeting were alerted to the fact that the meeting was being recorded. We discussed the matter and AI Companion duly sumarized the discussion as follows:-

AI Companion Feature Discussion and Concerns

The team discussed the introduction of an AI companion feature in their meetings, enabled by John, which was found to be useful for summarizing discussions and identifying action items. However, there were concerns raised about AI taking over tasks, potential privacy issues, and the impact on the planet due to AI data storage. The team decided to leave the feature on for further experimentation, and Paul suggested that the AI could be run on the client’s machine. The team also briefly discussed the performance of the AI in different languages.