Zoom Introduces Additional Features To Compete With Microsoft, Google, Slack, Calendly

Zoom is releasing new services to compete with several businesses including Slack, Calendly, Google, and Microsoft weeks after laying off 1,300 workers (about 15% of the company).

Together with video "Huddles," a meeting planner, and AI-powered meeting summaries, these capabilities also include whiteboard creation.

The business wants you to rely more on its tools for more of your job duties.

In response, Zoom is making its email and calendar applications available to everyone.

The video conferencing business began testing these capabilities in a broad exploration area outside of meetings last year.

Moreover, hosted email and calendar services with complete encryption security and paying customers' own custom domains are available.

These services might be used by businesses as an alternative to Google Workspace and Microsoft Exchange.

It is rare to go more than a few hours these days without hearing a firm announce generative AI features.

When you join a meeting in the middle, Zoom's Zoom IQ assistant will continue to "ask further questions" and deliver AI-powered summaries for you.

When the meeting is finished, the bot will update Zoom's team chat feature with a summary.

The assistant can also provide a summary of the team chat conversations.

Prior until now, Zoom IQ could automatically list action items, segment a meeting into chapters, and capture meeting highlights.

The business also introduced Zoom IQ for Sales last year with the intention of giving sales teams access to analytics from video calls.

With Zoom IQ, which assists users in drafting meeting agendas and composing chats, emails, and whiteboard sessions, Zoom promises a creative future.

With plans for a later, bigger release, the business is allowing customers to test out these capabilities starting next month.

The business stated that it is working with OpenAI to provide AI functionality, but it didn't say if the collaboration is limited to API access or encompasses more.

The business also unveiled other goods that weren't AI-related.

It released Zoom Scheduler in public beta, a service similar to Calendly for sharing availability and scheduling appointments.

Also, Zoom launched a new type of virtual coworking space called a Zoom Huddle where users can join and leave at any moment.

This feature is comparable to the Slack Huddles function, which was released in 2021 and allows users to hold short real-time audio or video discussions.

There are several fights that Zoom appears to be engaged in.

In an effort to stave off the assault of Microsoft and Google, it is offering generative AI tools to produce emails, meeting agendas, and whiteboards.

New generative AI features for workplaces have been unveiled by each of them.

On the other hand, it is vying to be a useful office tool that challenges Slack, Calendly, and Otter outside of meetings.

Recently, a ChatGPT bot developed by OpenAI and Slack was unveiled.

The OtterPilot assistant, a transcribing tool that automatically summarises meetings, was simultaneously released.

Some more meeting-related technologies have been introducing summarising capabilities driven by AI in various forms.

In the past year, Zoom's stock has fallen more than 40%.

In the fourth quarter results for the 2023 fiscal year, the corporation saw its first quarterly deficit since 2018 at a cost of $108 million.

For fiscal year, it anticipates sales between $4.435 billion and $4.455 billion with slowing growth of 1.1%.