Zoom offers more AI features for healthcare organizations
Zoom announced expanded Zoom AI Companion capabilities for its regulated healthcare and education customers this week at its Zoomtopia 2023 virtual event.
WHY IT MATTERS
Users can now manage their AI Companion settings for meetings, team chat, whiteboard, and email all in one place in the Zoom web portal.
Zoom customers can expect AI Companion across the platform, according to the announcement Tuesday.
The real-time digital assistant capabilities can be used in meetings, team chat, phone, email and the whiteboard tools, and there’s more on the video conferencing vendor’s roadmap.
Healthcare system customers can now generate and organize ideas in Zoom Whiteboard using AI summarization, the company said. These users will also soon receive help from AI Companion to generate and categorize ideas, and by spring 2024, be able to use their whiteboard content to generate images and fill in templates.
When enabled by administrators and users, Zoom Meeting video now provides automatically generated highlights and “smart chapters,” along with summaries and next steps.
During a meeting, if enabled by the meeting host, late participants can use the AI Companion panel during the meeting to ask real-time questions about what they missed and receive AI-generated answers.
AI additions in Zoom Chat, Zoom Mail, Zoom Notes and Zoom Phone include conversation summaries, suggested answers and integrated meeting summaries, Zoom said.
The company said it uses a federated approach to AI, integrating its own major language models, along with third-party models – Meta Llama 2, OpenAI and Anthropic and others.
Pre-meeting preparation features are also being developed – they will use AI Companion to surface knowledge from meetings, chats, whiteboards, emails and Zoom documents – another new tool announced at this week’s virtual conference – and with users’ permission, from third-party applications, the company said.
Users may also soon have the option to receive real-time feedback on their meeting attendance, as well as coaching on their conversation and presentation skills, Zoom said.
“Zoom continues to invest in AI across our platform and takes a leading position in AI technology by being transparent that communications-like customer content will not be used to train Zoom’s AI models or third-party artificial intelligence models” , Mahesh Ram, head of AI applications at Zoom, said in the statement.
THE BIG TREND
In response to assumptions about terms of service changes, Zoom announced in August that it will not use customer audio, video, chat, screen sharing, attachments or other customer content – such as poll results, whiteboards or responses – to train its LLMs or other third-party models.
In the blog post answerZoom has addressed concerns about HIPAA-secure calls on the platform.
“Different contracts exist for customers who buy directly from us, including businesses and customers in regulated industries such as education and healthcare, and updates to the online terms of service will not impact these customers,” wrote Smita Hashim, Zoom’s Chief Product Officer .
At the beginning of September, the company also announced that the integrated Companion AI has been disabled by default.
The platform is well used across the healthcare ecosystem for virtual care and other digital services. Laura Mrazik, telehealth manager at MaineGeneral Health, told Healthcare IT News earlier this year that Zoom is helping MaineGeneral Health increase its telehealth success.
“We appreciate Zoom’s ability for the customer organization to manage account-level settings internally, and the flexibility of the application to meet the needs of different use cases,” she said.
“Zoom’s support portal has both a forum where you can ask questions of other customers, and a library of instructions for how our own team can troubleshoot issues or make configuration changes.”
ON THE RECORD
“With the incredible capabilities of Zoom AI Companion, knowledge workers can have the power of large language models in their pockets without breaking the bank,” Ram said in the announcement. “Zoom AI Companion is built to assist with everyday tasks, including whiteboarding capabilities, and provides a boost to productivity when you need it.”
Andrea Fox is editor-in-chief of Healthcare IT News.
Email: afox@himss.org
Healthcare IT News is a HIMSS Media publication