Zoom launched new products at its Zoomtopia conference on Wednesday, including an enhanced AI companion designed to work across multiple meeting applications.

The update introduces the ability to add personal notes, AI-powered meeting scheduling, and AI avatars that resemble users. These features aim to strengthen Zoom’s position against specialised meeting startups and productivity suites.

The company has long provided an AI bot capable of recording and transcribing Zoom meetings. However, competitors such as Read AI, Otter, Fireflies, Granola and Circleback have made significant advances in cross-application meeting notetaking. To meet this challenge, Zoom’s AI companion now works with other platforms, including Google Meet and Microsoft Teams, and offers note-taking during in-person meetings.

Zoom has adopted a feature similar to Granola’s, allowing users to jot down their own notes during meetings, which AI then expands and structures. The update also adds cross-platform search functionality, enabling users to retrieve information from Google and Microsoft environments.

New calendar features will assist users in finding time slots suitable for all attendees. Additionally, the AI companion can suggest meetings that may be skipped through a new ‘free up my time’ request. Calendar tool Clockwise launched a similar service last year to address scheduling conflicts.

Proactive meeting recommendations will include suggested tasks and agenda items to aid preparation, as well as a group AI assistant for collaborative support.

Zoom will introduce photorealistic avatars that mimic user actions during video calls. These avatars, already demonstrated by CEO Eric Yuan earlier this year, are intended for use when users are not ‘camera-ready’. However, concerns remain over potential misuse, such as deepfake impersonation, which may prompt corporate IT departments to disable the feature.

The avatars and other new features are expected to be available to consumers by the end of the year.

Hosts will gain the ability to use Zoom Clips, an asynchronous video tool, alongside AI avatars to greet participants in waiting rooms and explain meeting objectives. AI will also support new live translation capabilities.

Zoom is rolling out an upgraded web interface to highlight its AI companion. Additional AI-powered tools include a writing assistant for drafting emails and documents, and a research function.

Further improvements include custom AI agents with support for Model Context Protocol (MCP), higher bit rate and 60fps support for Zoom meetings, and a new video management tool to organise video assets.