If you’ve ever been tapped to take notes at a virtual meeting, you know it can be tough to keep up with what’s being said in real-time. The good news is, most platforms have a built-in AI just waiting to create a text summary of your meeting. Besides allowing everyone to focus on the meeting, using AI to create the summary will also help folks who were unable to attend or watch a recording of the meeting.
Which Meeting Platforms Offer AI?
I could not find a meeting platform that offers an AI assistant in the free plan. Here are some platforms that offer an AI assistant on their paid tiers:
- Zoom (Pro plan or higher)
- Webex (Meet plan or higher)
- Microsoft Teams (Microsoft 365 premium license)
- Google Meet – Gemini will be offered as a paid upgrade to Google Workspace
A Closer Look
How does an AI summarize meetings? Let’s take a look at what Zoom’s AI does when activated during a virtual meeting:
- Recaps the discussion
- Pulls out key points to highlight
- Creates action items based on the discussion
- Recognizes who is speaking and refers to them by screen name in the summary
- Supports multiple languages
Getting Started
If you login as part of an organization, you may need to ask your IT admin to enable the “Meeting Summary with AI Companion” setting in Zoom. In this step, they/you will choose whether to email the summary to host and attendees. If you choose to send to attendees, only those who registered for the meeting through the Zoom portal will get the summary automatically. Anyone who received the link manually will not get a summary. Summaries are also viewable through the Zoom portal (for account holder/host).
Once summaries are enabled, there will be an option in the in-meeting controls to start the summary. Only the host or co-host can start the summary. Be sure to wait until the meeting starts, or the AI will summarize your pre-meeting discussion, as well. Also, if you are sending to all attendees by default, make sure that the content of your meeting is suitable for all people who will receive the meeting summary. There will be no opportunity to edit the summary before the automatic emails go out.
Viewing the Summary
Depending on how automatic email summaries are enabled on the account, either the host will get a summary email, or everyone who registered for the meeting using the Zoom platform will get a summary email.
If only the host is the only one who receives an automatic email summary, there will be an opportunity for them to edit the summary before sharing. If no email summaries were sent, the host can log in to the Zoom platform and access the summary by going to settings>AI companion>my summaries and share, edit, or delete.
Need More Help?
For a full step-by-step walk-through with screenshots showing how to use Zoom with AI Companion, check out this Tech-Talk article about AI Companion. Looking for more Tech Tips articles about AI?
