Zoom Leverages Machine Learning to Expand Online Meeting Experience

Zoom Video Communications at a Zoomtopia Users Conference this week announced it has developed a Meeting Transcript capability that employs machine learning algorithms to convert the words spoken in a video conference into text.

Oded Gal, head of products for Zoom Video Communications, says users will also be able to search that text to find specific segments of recorded video, and in the future, Zoom intends to add sentiment analysis tools that can be used to identify positive or negative comments. Gal says Zoom is also working to inject augmented reality capabilities into online meetings.

In fact, Gal contends that it won’t be long before online meetings provide a superior experience to meeting individuals in person.

“The online experience is going to be much better,” says Gal.

Other new capabilities being added to the Zoom conferencing service include integration with Workplace collaboration software from Facebook and the ability to access Zoom Rooms from, for example, a digital signage platform.

Gal says these capabilities will make it possible for Zoom to be applied in new use cases such as education and corporate training.

Zoom intends to roll out these new capabilities across the coming year, so it may take a while longer for online meetings to become a lot more useful. But it won’t be too long before everything that occurs during an online meeting gets included in everyone’s personal record.