16.03.2026
15 min
Zoom AI Companion Review: My Honest Feedback
By Sanduni
Growth Content Editor
I wanted to take a proper look at Zoom AI Companion and give you an honest review of what it does well, where it falls short, and how it compares to Jamie as an alternative.
This article covers all the main features, pros and cons, and everything you might need to know about both tools so you can decide which AI meeting assistant fits your exact needs.
What's New in Zoom AI Companion (2026)
Since I first looked at this tool, Zoom has shipped some big updates with version 3.0 (December 2025). Here is what's new:
• Cross-platform support. Zoom AI Companion now works with Google Meet, Microsoft Teams, and WebEx. If your clients or team use different platforms, you are no longer locked into Zoom-only meetings.
• In-person meeting support. You can now use Zoom's Voice Recorder to transcribe face-to-face conversations and get AI-generated notes from them.
• Free Basic plan access. You can try select AI Companion features without paying anything. That was not an option before.
• Standalone add-on for $10/month. If you don't have a paid Zoom plan but still want AI Companion, you can get it on its own.
• Smart recordings. Recorded meetings get broken into chapters and highlights, making it easier to find specific parts of a long call.
• Meeting Coach. Gives you metrics on how much you talked vs listened, your speaking pace, and filler words you used the most. Helpful if you are working on your presentation skills.
If you are already in the Zoom ecosystem, these are solid additions.
Is the Zoom AI Companion Any Good? (My Honest Review)
So here goes. Zoom AI Companion has changed a lot since it first launched, and I wanted to give you an honest look at where it stands in 2026.
The good news is, you can try some AI Companion features on the free Basic plan. If you want the full experience, the standalone add-on is $10 per month and doesn't require a paid Zoom license. I went with a paid plan so I could see everything it offers.
I also spent time reading what real Zoom users are saying on Zoom's own community forums. I think you deserve the full picture, not just the marketing page.
What real users are saying
Zoom AI Companion has a 4.5 out of 5 rating on Gartner Peer Insights, and the praise is real. One reviewer called the meeting summaries a "game changer" for keeping track of what was discussed. Another said it saves them time by automatically generating summaries so they don't have to write everything down.
A media architect at Duke University tested it on a complex, hour-long project management meeting and said:
"I always prided myself in writing exceptional meeting summaries. Zoom absolutely knocked this out of the park
The meeting summaries are the main draw. You get:
• A recap of what was discussed
• Action items pulled out automatically
• Everything sent to your email after the call
For busy days with back-to-back meetings, that saves real time.
What concerns me
I care about you making the right decision here, so I need to share what I found when I dug into Zoom's own community forums.
It doesn't always work when you need it to. One user wrote in October 2025 that it stopped triggering summaries entirely, even though everything was set up correctly. Their exact words:
"I've already lost 4 meeting summaries."
Four meetings worth of notes, just gone. Another user noticed summary quality dropped overnight in April 2025. Their notes went from 7-10 detailed paragraphs to just 1-3 short ones, with no warning.
The accuracy can be off. This one concerns me the most. One user reported that the AI Companion assigned an action item to someone who was never even in the meeting. No record of that person in the attendee list or transcript. If you act on a summary like that, it creates real confusion for your team.
The summaries don't go to everyone by default. According to Zoom's own help centre, the default sharing setting is "Only me (meeting host)." That means:
• Participants don't automatically get the summary
• Even with a paid account
• The host has to manually change their sharing settings
• Most hosts don't know that setting exists
So you could sit through an entire meeting expecting AI notes and get nothing.
The setup is heavier than you'd expect. Just for meeting summaries, Zoom has three separate levels of settings (Account, Group, and User) with sub-settings like IP address access control, auto-delete policies, OCR toggles, email preferences, custom disclaimers, and lock settings. And that is just one feature. Zoom has seven separate help centre articles just for enabling and disabling different AI Companion features.
One user on Zoom's forum put it well:
"I am super satisfied with work of an AI Companion BUT, only if it works."
Overall
Zoom AI Companion has genuinely useful features, and I don't want to take that away from it. The meeting summaries and the whiteboard are good.
But the reliability issues and accuracy gaps are real, and I think you should go in knowing about them. It is a tool that works well when it works. I just want you to have realistic expectations so you are not caught off guard.
Features of Zoom AI Companion (That I Actually Like!)
Meeting Questions with AI Companion
This is still one of the best things about Zoom AI Companion. If you join a meeting late, you can ask the AI Companion what you missed without interrupting anyone. It summarises what has been discussed so far, right there in the chat. You do not have to worry about catching up or asking someone to fill you in.
This feature is available on the free Basic plan, but with limited use. If you want full access to meeting questions, you will need a paid Zoom plan or the AI Companion add-on ($10/month). Just worth knowing before you rely on it for every call.
Whiteboard Feature
I still find this one genuinely fun. After a meeting, you can open the whiteboard and turn your discussion into something visual. You give it a prompt related to what you just talked about and it generates a starting point.
You can generate your ideas or queries in the form of:
- Stickers
- Tables
- Mindmap
- Flowchart
Suppose you just finished a meeting about a new project. Open the whiteboard feature to organize your ideas. You can use the Mindmap option to draw out a visual representation of the brainstorming topics, stickers to highlight key points, and tables to assign tasks. The possibilities are actually endless!
Smart Recordings
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Source: Zoom
This is a nice quality-of-life upgrade. When you record a Zoom meeting, the AI Companion now automatically breaks the recording into chapters and highlights.
Instead of scrubbing through an hour-long call trying to find the part where the client gave feedback, you get a structured breakdown. Each chapter is labelled, so you can jump straight to the section you need.
If you are someone who records meetings for reference but never actually goes back and watches them (because who has the time), this makes recorded meetings genuinely useful again.
Meeting Coach
Source: Zoom
This one is interesting if you are working on how you come across in meetings. Meeting Coach gives you metrics on:
- How much you talked vs listened
- Your speaking pace
- Filler words you used the most
It is not judging you. It just gives you the data so you can decide if you want to adjust. If you are doing sales calls, client presentations, or job interviews over Zoom, having that feedback after each call can help you improve over time.
It is a subtle feature, but it is one of those things that adds up the more you use it.
💜 If you are like me and do not like being scored on how you speak, or do not want your team to feel like they are under a magnifying glass, I would recommend Jamie. Jamie is a bot-free AI meeting note taker. When you use Zoom on platforms like Google Meet or Microsoft Teams, Zoom sends a bot that shows up in the attendee list. Jamie does not do that. It also does not score your speaking or track your filler words. No bots, no reports on how you talked. Just natural conversations, the way they are supposed to be.
Pros and Cons Of Zoom AI Companion Features
✅ Innovative feature of the whiteboard. It especially helps with meetings that need a visual structure.
✅ Semantic analyses to know how the team members are feeling can add a nice personal touch to knowing how they feel. However, I’d rather not get analyzed like that; I would rather attend a meeting without having my feelings checked. A little bit of privacy, please. But I do understand the reason behind it, but still, I’d rather not have it checked on me.
✅ AI Companion can write responses, summarize chats, and prompt sharing of next steps in Zoom Team Chat.
✅ AI Companion is in the Zoom Team Chat window so you can connect with your team.
❌ The free Basic plan gives you limited AI Companion features, which is a start. But for the full experience (meeting summaries, cross-platform support, and more), you need a paid plan starting at $13.33 per month for Pro (billed annually). You can also get AI Companion as a standalone add-on for $10 per month. I do wish you could test all the features properly before committing to a paid plan.
❌ Speaker identification is limited to Zoom users, meaning if someone outside of the meeting spoke, for example, a team member next to you, it won’t be transcribed.
❌ Custom vocabulary requires the Custom AI Companion add-on ($12 per month per user) and is managed by account admins, so individual users can't add their own industry-specific terms.
❌ Zoom AI Companion now works with Google Meet, Microsoft Teams, and WebEx, but it joins as a visible bot participant. Your meeting participants will see a recording bot join with Zoom branding and your name attached, which might feel disruptive.
Now that we have covered everything on Zoom AI Companion, let's look at the best alternative to Zoom AI Companion
What is Jamie?
💜 Try out Jamie in our hands-on demo and see how easy (and fun!) note-taking can be!
Jamie is a meeting assistant app that summarises your meetings and gives you notes, action items, and full transcripts. With one click, you can start recording, and Jamie takes care of the rest. The audio is deleted soon after the transcription process is over, and you are only left with amazing meeting notes, action items and transcriptions.
It works with any video conferencing platform and gives you a bot-free meeting experience, which means your privacy stays intact and the conversation flows naturally.
Jamie's Ask AI feature lets you search through your past meetings, draft emails, and brainstorm ideas. You can also get reminders for upcoming meetings when you connect your calendar, which helps you stay on top of things.
What Makes Jamie unique?
1. Ask AI
Jamie's Ask AI feature works like a personal assistant for your meeting history. It works in three different ways depending on where you are in the app.
From your meetings list, Ask AI searches through all your meetings at once. Inside a single meeting, it only looks at that specific summary and transcript. And if you're inside a tagged view, it searches just those tagged meetings, which is great when you want to focus on a specific project or client.
You can use it to draft follow-up emails after a sales call, get coaching on your sales approach based on what was actually said, create detailed task lists split by speaker, or quickly check whether a candidate gave a good answer in an interview. It pulls real information from your actual meetings, so the answers are based on what was discussed, not guesses.
You can open it by clicking the Ask AI widget in the bottom right of your screen.
2. Compatible with All Video Conferencing Platforms, Without a Bot
Jamie works with any video conferencing platform you use, including Zoom, Microsoft Teams, Google Meet, and more. This means you don't have to switch tools or change your workflow. No matter which platform your team or client uses, Jamie captures and summarises your meetings.
What makes this different is how it works. Jamie records directly from your device's microphone, so it never joins the call as a participant. There's no bot popping up in the meeting, no extra attendee in the list, and no awkward "who is that?" moment when you're on a client call.
Some other tools have started offering cross-platform support too. Zoom's AI Companion can join Google Meet, Microsoft Teams, and more, but it does so as a visible bot participant. It shows up in the attendee list with a name like "Zoom AI Companion for [Your Name]" and posts a message in the chat saying it's transcribing. That can feel strange, especially on external calls. Jamie skips all of that. You just press start and it works quietly in the background.
3. Simple and Non-intrusive, Bot-Free Meeting Experience (Privacy-Focused)
Jamie offers a completely bot-free meeting experience, meaning it operates as a native application on your device. This means your privacy is protected and the conversation flows freely. You get all the benefits of meeting assistance without the distraction or security risks of external bots in your meetings.
4. Your Meeting Notes, Structured and Ready to Use
Once your meeting is transcribed, Jamie gives you a structured summary with an executive summary, a full summary organised by topic, a complete transcript, and a list of action items.
You can also teach Jamie your industry-specific terms using the Custom Words feature, so your notes get more accurate over time. If your meetings include company names, product terms, or technical jargon that an AI might mishear, just add them to your custom words list and Jamie will get them right. You can do this in your settings, or even faster, just highlight a wrong word in your notes, hit replace, and Jamie learns it on the spot.
For comparison, Zoom AI Companion recently introduced custom vocabulary support, but it requires the Custom AI Companion add-on at an extra $12 per user per month. Jamie includes Custom Words on all plans, including the free plan.
5. Works Wherever Your Meetings Happen, With Your Privacy Intact
Jamie captures audio through your device's microphone, and that's why it works with any video conferencing platform you're already using. Zoom, Google Meet, Microsoft Teams, or anything else.
But it also works for in-person meetings. If you're sitting in a room with your team or meeting a client face to face, you can still use Jamie to capture the conversation. Just press start on your phone or laptop, have your meeting, and press stop when you're done.
Because Jamie picks up the audio directly from your device, there's no need to install plugins, connect third-party apps, or invite a bot to your call. And once transcription is complete, the audio is deleted permanently. Your notes and transcript are stored on servers in EU, encrypted at rest and in transit. Jamie is a German company, fully GDPR compliant, with an external data protection officer and yearly audits.
This matters because not all AI meeting tools handle your data the same way. Zoom AI Companion, for example, may retain the customer content used for AI features for up to 30 days after providing the service. Their third-party model providers may also retain your content in the U.S. for up to 30 days for trust and safety purposes. Zoom does offer a Zero Data Retention option for meeting summaries, but it's not enabled by default and you have to request it from your account team.
With Jamie, there's nothing to configure. Audio is deleted immediately after transcription, your data stays in the EU, and that's just how it works on every plan, including the free one.
6. Your Meeting Notes Go Where Your Work Lives
Jamie connects to the tools you're already using. Even on the free plan, you can automatically sync every meeting to Notion, Google Docs, and OneNote. On Pro, your notes also flow to Salesforce, HubSpot, Asana, and Attio. You can enable automatic sync so every meeting gets sent over without you lifting a finger.
For context, Zoom AI Companion's base plan only auto-sends meeting summaries to Slack. They do offer broader third-party integrations now (including Salesforce, Notion, Asana, and more), but those require the Custom AI Companion add-on at an extra $12 per user per month on top of your Zoom plan. And even with the add-on, those integrations are on-demand, you ask AI Companion to create a task or update a record through a side panel. It's not the same as your notes automatically landing in the right place after every meeting.
With Jamie, your sales calls go straight to HubSpot or Salesforce with the summary attached. Your project meetings land in Asana as tasks. Your team notes show up in Notion automatically. You just have your meeting and everything flows to where it needs to be.
7. Templates That Match How You Actually Meet
Not every meeting is the same, and your notes shouldn't look the same either. Jamie lets you create custom templates for different meeting types, so your standup summary looks different from your sales call summary, and your 1:1 notes are structured the way you actually need them.
You can set templates to auto-apply based on the meeting type. So if Jamie recognises a sales call, it automatically formats the summary with sections for pain points, objections, and next steps. A team standup gets a different layout with updates, blockers, and action items. You set it up once and it just works from there.
Teams can also share templates across the workspace, so everyone's notes come out in the same format. It saves a surprising amount of time when you don't have to reformat notes after every call.
8. Organise Your Meetings with Tags
Once you start having a lot of meetings, finding the right one later can get tricky. Jamie's tags let you organise meetings by project, client, department, or whatever makes sense for how you work.
Tags can be private (just for you) or shared with specific teammates. When you share a tag, everyone who has access can see all the meetings under it. So if your team is working on a project together, you can tag all the related meetings and everyone stays on the same page without sharing your entire meeting library.
You can also filter your meetings by tag in the sidebar, and Ask AI respects tags too. If you're in a tagged view and ask a question, Jamie only searches through those tagged meetings.
9. Webhooks for Custom Workflows
If your team has specific systems that meeting data needs to flow into, Jamie supports webhooks. When a meeting is completed, Jamie can automatically send the summary, transcript, and tasks to any endpoint you set up.
This means you can build custom workflows. Meeting finishes, data lands in your internal database, a ticket gets created, a notification fires. You can set up to 5 webhook endpoints per workspace, and it works with tools like Make.com if you want to connect without writing code.
Webhooks are available on Pro, Team, and Enterprise plans.
How Much Does Jamie Cost?
Jamie has several pricing plans depending on what you need:
- Free: €0/month (10 meeting credits, 30 minutes per meeting)
- Plus: €25/month (20 meeting credits, up to 2 hours per meeting)
- Pro: €47/month (unlimited meeting credits, up to 3 hours per meeting)
- Team: €39/member per month (unlimited meeting credits, up to 3 hours per meeting)
- Enterprise: custom pricing
Now that we covered Jamie, let's talk about Zoom AI Companion
⭐Final Thoughts
When talking about Zoom AI Companion, I like the real-time transcription abilities and innovative features of Zoom AI Companion, such as the whiteboard and the ability to ask questions from the AI Companion.
These features are particularly useful for virtual meetings, making it easier to track discussions and visually organize ideas. However, some of the newer features come with trade-offs. Cross-platform support means a visible bot joins your non-Zoom meetings, custom vocabulary requires an additional add-on ($12 per month per user), and the full AI Companion experience still requires a paid plan.
Let's go through the best use cases for both tools to come to a conclusion on which AI meeting tool best fits your needs.
Best Use Cases
Zoom AI Companion
- Best for: Heavy Zoom users and those whose clients or prospects also use Zoom.
- Real-Life Scenarios:
- HR Managers and Team Leads:
- Feature: Sentiment Analysis
- Scenario: During a team meeting, the sentiment analysis feature can gauge team morale, helping you address any issues promptly. If the team appears disengaged, you can adjust your approach to re-engage them.
- Marketing and Creative Teams:
- Feature: Zoom Whiteboard
- Scenario: In a marketing brainstorming session, the Zoom Whiteboard allows your team to visually map out ideas and strategies, enhancing collaboration and creativity. This helps create a clear plan that everyone can follow.
- Event Planners and Coordinators:
- Feature: AI Companion Questions
- Scenario: As an event planner, you can use the AI Companion to quickly catch up on missed details by asking questions in real-time during a busy planning meeting. This ensures nothing is overlooked, even if you join the meeting late.
Jamie:
- Best for: Users needing flexibility across various video conferencing platforms.
- Real-Life Scenarios:
- Project Managers and Team Leaders:
- Feature: Detailed Summaries
- Scenario: After a long project meeting, Jamie provides a detailed summary that includes all tasks assigned, making it easy for you to follow up with your team. This ensures everyone knows their responsibilities and next steps, keeping the project on track.
- Sales Professionals:
- Feature: Flexibility Across Platforms
- Scenario: During a sales call on Google Meet or any other meeting platform your client uses, Jamie can capture every detail, regardless of the platform your client uses. This way you don’t miss any client requests or feedback. You can easily review the meeting summary to prepare personalized follow-up emails, improving client relations and sales outcomes.
- Consultants and Freelancers:
- Feature: Works across any meeting platform
- Scenario: Whether your client uses Zoom, Google Meet, or Microsoft Teams, Jamie captures the conversation for you. After the call, you can review the full transcript and summary to draft a detailed report for your client, so nothing gets lost between the meeting and the follow-up..
- Executives and Decision Makers:
- Feature: Ask AI
- Scenario: You can use Jamie's Ask AI to search through your past meetings and find the information you need before making a decision in a board meeting. Instead of scrolling through old notes, you ask a question and get your answer from your meeting history.
- Educators and Trainers:
- Feature: Privacy and Customization
- Scenario: After an online lecture, Jamie’s notes help you review key points and prepare for the next class. You can use these notes to improve future sessions based on what was covered and how students responded.
- Startups and Small Businesses:
- Feature: Range of Pricing Plans
- Scenario: As a small business owner, you can use Jamie’s free plan to manage internal meetings and client calls, keeping track of action items and decisions without extra costs. This helps you stay organized and efficient while saving money.
Choosing the best AI meeting assistant depends on what you need and the tools you already have. Zoom AI Companion is good for teams and organizations deeply embedded in the Zoom ecosystem. It helps with real-time assistance, has cool features like the Zoom Whiteboard, and checks how people are feeling during meetings to keep everyone engaged and productive.
Jamie is a flexible and privacy-focused tool that works with many video platforms, making it a good fit for project managers, salespeople, consultants, executives, teachers, startups, small businesses, and even large companies. Jamie gives you detailed summaries with one click, works across all your meeting platforms, and offers AI features and customisable templates, making it easy to manage meetings wherever they happen.
Jamie's Ask AI feature is worth mentioning here too. It lets you search through your past meetings, draft follow-up emails, and brainstorm ideas, all from one place. It might save you quite a bit of time when you need to pull something from a meeting you had weeks ago.
Think about your workflow, budget, and how you usually run meetings to decide which AI assistant fits your needs best. Both Jamie and Zoom AI Companion offer great features to make your meetings better and more productive. However, the choice is completely up to you!
I hope you enjoyed this article and that it provided value to you! Do share the article with your friends who would find it useful.
FAQs
What is Zoom's AI Companion?
Zoom's AI Companion, formerly known as Zoom IQ, is an AI-powered assistant integrated into the Zoom platform. It helps improve productivity by summarizing meetings, drafting emails, composing chat messages, and providing real-time feedback during meetings. It's available at no extra cost for users with paid Zoom accounts. Limited AI Companion features are also included on the free Basic plan, and a standalone AI Companion add-on is available for $10 per month.
What AI Tools Does Zoom AI Companion Offer?
Zoom AI Companion offers various AI tools, including meeting summaries, email and chat message composition, real-time feedback during meetings, and smart recordings that divide cloud recordings into chapters for easy review
How Does Zoom AI Companion Provide Real-Time Feedback?
During meetings, AI Companion can give real-time feedback on your communication, such as how often you're speaking versus listening. This helps you adjust your communication style in the moment to improve engagement and effectiveness
How Does Zoom AI Companion Help if I Miss a Meeting?
If you miss a meeting, AI Companion can generate a detailed summary highlighting key points, action items, and important discussions. This allows you to catch up quickly without needing to watch the entire meeting recording
How Does Jamie Help in Meetings?
Jamie automatically creates meeting notes, summaries, and transcripts, and captures key points, decisions, and action items. It also has an Ask AI feature that helps you search through your past meetings, draft follow-up emails, and brainstorm ideas.
Can Jamie Work With Different Video Conferencing Platforms?
Yes, Jamie is compatible with all major video conferencing platforms, including Zoom, Microsoft Teams, Google Meet, and more. This means you can use Jamie without changing your existing workflow or tools.
How does Ask AI work?
Ask AI is Jamie's built-in feature that lets you search through your past meetings, draft follow-up emails, and brainstorm ideas. You can open it by clicking the Ask AI widget in the bottom right of your screen. It works across all your meetings, within a single meeting, or filtered by tags.
Is Jamie Privacy-Focused?
Yes, Jamie offers a completely bot-free meeting experience, operating as a native application on your device. This ensures your meetings remain private and secure, with no external bots interrupting or accessing your data.
Does Jamie Transcribe In-Person Meetings?
Yes! Jamie captures audio through your device's microphone, so you can use it for in-person meetings too. Just press start, and Jamie transcribes the conversation and gives you a full summary and transcript afterwards. The audio is deleted once transcription is complete.
How Good Are Jamie’s Notes and Transcriptions?
Jamie produces accurate notes that capture the key points of your meetings, including discussions, decisions, and action items. You can also add Custom Words to teach Jamie your industry-specific terms, which helps improve accuracy over time. Everything is editable, so you can adjust anything that needs it.
What Are the Pricing Plans for Jamie?
Jamie has several plans depending on what you need:
- Free: €0/month (10 meeting credits, 30 minutes per meeting)
- Plus: €25/month (20 meeting credits, up to 2 hours per meeting)
- Pro: €47/month (unlimited meeting credits, up to 3 hours per meeting)
- Team: €39/member per month (unlimited meeting credits, up to 3 hours per meeting)
- Enterprise: custom pricing
Who Can Benefit From Using Jamie?
Jamie is a good fit for project managers, sales professionals, consultants, executives, educators, startups, small businesses, and even large companies. Its flexible features make it suitable for a wide range of users and meeting types.
Sanduni Yureka is a Growth Content Editor at Jamie, known for driving a 10x increase in website traffic for clients across Singapore, the U.S., and Germany. With an LLB Honors degree and a background in law, Sanduni transitioned from aspiring lawyer to digital marketing expert during the 2019 lockdown. She now specializes in crafting high-impact SEO strategies for AI-powered SaaS companies, particularly those using large language models (LLMs). When she’s not binge-watching true crime shows, Sanduni is obsessed with studying everything SEO.
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