Zoom offers an interesting set of new features that can create transcripts, summaries, and annotations for live meetings and recordings. These can make it easier to recap or search the content from a meeting or class, or access a textual interpretation in real time, with significant implications for accessibility (for more on this, see Assignments in the Context of AI). If you, for example, use Zoom to record all of your lectures, students will be able to download summaries and easily check where a particular concept was covered.
Zoom can, if you enable the feature, use Optical Character Recognition to make use of the text displayed on slides in generating its summaries.
How to enable
You can enable these features as follows:
“In Zoom, log into your Zoom account via the web, then go to your Settings page and go to the AI Companion tab and turn on features you want to use. During a meeting, you can click the Start Summary icon (page with diamond shapes) at the bottom of the screen. If you’ve turned on “Smart Recording with AI Companion” then starting cloud recording will automatically engage the AI.” – From the UIS AI Features FAQ
Settings to consider include:
- Allow users to ask AI Companion questions about the meeting – for the in-meeting AI Companion panel
- Meeting summary with AI Companion – for summaries emailed to you after a meeting
- Use screen share content with OCR – to include text on slides in AI summaries
- Smart recording with AI Companion – for annotated recordings
Meeting summaries
Zoom can create an AI-generated summary of the main content of a meeting. The summary will include a quick recap, next steps, and summaries of the main topics covered as perceived by the AI. You can set this up so that the summaries will be sent to you (or even to all attendees) automatically, or you can access them from the Summaries tab in Zoom. An example usage for these summaries is for students to quickly check in which class a particular concept was covered, or save summaries with their notes for future reference.
Transcripts
While a meeting is ongoing, you can enable the transcript, which will make it possible for all attendees to access a running transcript of the entire meeting. With a transcript, any attendee can access the content in written form, including to look back at previous moments in the discussion and search for particular terms to see what has been said.
If you record a meeting to the cloud, the recording will include a full transcript of what is said as perceived by the AI. This can allow students to find where a concept is discussed by searching the text, and to access spoken content in a written modality. This is unlikely to fully replace careful note-taking, but may be a helpful counterpoint.
You can access these from the Recordings & Transcripts tab. Clicking a particular recording will give you access to the recording, transcript, chat log, and a shareable link you can use to share these with students. You will be able to edit these before sharing.
Highlights and Chapters
In your Settings page, under the AI Companion tab, you can enable an option for Smart recording with AI Companion that can create recording highlights, chapters, and more when you are recording to the cloud. When these features are enabled, accessing the cloud recording will display a set of highlights (with an option to only play through the highlights), smart chapters marked in the video with written summaries such that a viewer can jump to the chapter they want, and a summary of the video. Students can use these to quickly revise a class or to quickly and effectively skip to the section they want to revisit. You will be able to edit these before sharing to ensure accuracy.
Meeting Companion
While a meeting is ongoing, you can enable an option for all participants to access the AI meeting companion in a side panel. Attendees can ask the AI questions about what has been discussed, summaries of concepts, and next steps/action points. The AI works only from what has been said in the meeting, and cannot perform external web searches. In its summaries, it will reference specific points in the transcript to support its findings. At the end of a summary you will find numbers which, when clicked, will display the relevant excerpt from the transcript.
For more guidance on using this tool, visit:
General Considerations for Using AI in Teaching and Learning
Course Policy Guidance
Introduction to Prompting
Applications for Student Learning
Assignments in the Context of AI
Labor-Saving Tips for Educators