popped up in my Zoom room, a little button labeled "AI Companion." It has proven a good companion indeed.
I have been mentoring a mid-career director of a writing center on the West Coast, and by accident I triggered the feature. In return we got this, when the meeting ended:
- An executive summary of the topics we discussed
- A bullet-listed synopsis of ideas, suggestions, and strategies broken down by topic
- A nearly error-free synthesis of the entire meeting.
The software (Zoom's own proprietary AI) uses Zoom's captioning tool to capture what we say; no video gets recorded. I'm guessing that the data gets shared without our permission with the firm. Caveat emptor.
My mentee loved the accidental result and plans to try it himself. With a few writing students who agreed to use the Companion, I opened my Zoom room during a face-to-face meeting. When done, I e-mailed them the Zoom AI synopsis. Again, save for misspelling a name or two, the AI succinctly and clearly summed up what we had done.
Whenever I meet someone "scared" of AI, I mention uses such as this as good practices. While I remain a skeptical adopter of this new technology, I rather like a robotic note-taker who works with us openly (and not in secret) while freeing humans to focus on each other rather than on taking notes.
For students with dysgraphia or other disorders that require them to record a class session, this little feature of Zoom is a godsend. Try AI Companion yourself and let me know what you think.
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