‘We won’t use meetings to train our AI’: Zoom

The communications giant has unveiled a digital assistant and changed its terms of service over fears it used customer data to train its large language models.

The video conferencing outfit rose to prominence and became a household name during the pandemic, helping workers stay productive and connected. Its share price also boomed, reaching a high of $US559 in October 2020, more than five times its current price of around $US71. Photo by Olivier DOULIERY / AFP)

Zoom has updated its terms of service after a backlash over fears that it trained its generative AI on customer calls, and now says categorically that meetings and videos won’t be used to train its large language models, as it readies a bevy of new AI-powered meeting features.

Zoom this week unveiled ‘AI Companion’, its AI-powered digital assistant that will sit in on meetings and take notes, answer questions and provide auto-generated minutes to anyone who missed the meeting.

By next year, users will also have the ability to receive real-time feedback on their presence in meetings, as well as coaching on their conversational and presentation skills.

The company has tightened its privacy settings however following user backlash over fears that meetings and Zoom calls were helping train the company’s AI models. Its terms of service seemed to grant the company royalty-free frights in perpetuity for customer video calls and presentations to train its generative AI.

Speaking in an interview with The Australian, Zoom’s global chief product officer Smita Hashim said that audio, video and chats are now not been used to train AI at all, and that its AI Companion will be turned off by default. She said those decisions give the company a leadership position in transparency and user trust.

“We did very much start with the position that if you give us your consent, you turn it on … But we’ve now taken a strong position that we don’t use customers’ conversational data for AI training, period. Whether it’s audio, video, chats, whiteboards, because we want users to be able to join meetings with confidence,” Dr Hashim said.

“The world meets on Zoom and there are so many multi-party conversations, so we’ve now taken this very strong position which is hopefully very clear.”

The executive said that Zoom’s AI companion will ’transcend the hype’ and will be made available at no additional cost to paid Zoom user accounts.

The technology will be rolled out in phases over the next year.

“The world seems to really have changed in the last six months or so. From a Zoom point of view, AI has been an area we have invested in a lot, but with generative AI coming to the forefront we stepped back and said ‘how do we want to approach this whole space?’

“We have taken a federated approach, where dynamically we can connect with multiple models and provide users with the best possible outcomes while maintaining costs.”

Zoom’s AI assistant will incorporate the company’s own large language models along with third-party models including Meta Llama 2, OpenAI, and Anthropic.

The video conferencing outfit rose to prominence and became a household name during the pandemic, helping workers stay productive and connected. Its share price also boomed, reaching a high of $US559 in October 2020, more than five times its current price of around $US71.

With many companies mandating some form of return-to-office policy Zoom is now grappling with its place in a world of hybrid work, which Dr Hashim said is a more challenging problem to solve than fully remote work.

Zoom says it believes a “structured hybrid approach” is the most effective working option for its own employees, requiring staff who live within an 80-kilometre radius of an office to attend in person at least two days per week.

“We are very committed to hybrid work, and we are evolving our products to incorporate those use cases,” she said. “So kinds of things like being able to catch up on meetings later and participate, products like continuous meeting chat, or having multiple angle cameras so you can see everyone in the room.

A former Google executive, Dr Hashim started her career as a research scientist focused on video compression technologies and said that Zoom’s video quality is the reason it triumphed in the pandemic over rivals like Skype.

“The product just feels so comfortable, and when quality is not good the stress levels are higher,” she said. “It just works, and I think its quality, simplicity and connectivity are things that make it something people want to use.”