Zoom Will Soon Integrate Anthropic's Chatbot Across Its Platform

Zoom will be integrating Anthropic's AI Assistant across its productivity platform, starting with its Contact Center product to help businesses with customer support inquiries. The Verge reports: Zoom says Claude, a chatbot Anthropic launched in March, should help customer support agents by creating "better self-service features" that can help guide customers toward relevant solutions. It will also soon be able to surface necessary resources for agents while they're serving customers. The company is vague about how it will implement Claude in other areas of the app -- like Team Chat, Meetings, Phone, Whiteboard, and Zoom IQ -- but Zoom will likely leverage the assistant to help it compete with other productivity apps that use AI, like Slack. Zoom already has a suite of AI-powered capabilities available through Zoom IQ, an assistant it built through a partnership with OpenAI. So far, Zoom IQ can generate summaries and message drafts as well as create whiteboards based on text prompts.

Additionally, Zoom Ventures, a Zoom offshoot that invests in startups, also announced that it has made an investment in the Google-backed Anthropic. Zoom says working with both Anthropic and OpenAI helps bolster its "federated approach" to AI.

To summarize

[Rosco P. Coltrane]

Zoom: "Me too! Me too! We do AI too! Look!"

Resl Time Translation

[flyingfsck]

To me, the greatest feature would be instant translation like Google Translate does. I sat in a movie yesterday and used it to translate on the fly from Slovak to English. It mostly worked and helped me follow the plot.

Slashdot?

[antdude]

What about /.? ;)

Oh dear, more layoff. Didn't see that one comin...

[Rosco P. Coltrane]

starting with its Contact Center product to help businesses with customer support inquiries.

I feel sorry for the poor support technicians who will soon be made redundant. Which is why Zoom and every business investing in AI is really doing it for of course: slash their workforce and save money.

Sad, sad times...

Re:

[sg_oneill]

It does kinda suck for support people , but the reality is, these big transformer neural networks actually seem to give better support than most human support I've found.

They've made a good choice going with Claude too, its the most well aligned polite LLM I've encountered. Its competitive with ChatGPT in the brains department (GPT4 is probably slightly brighter, but not by too much, and Claude seems to work extremely well without many of the failure modes the GPTs seem to have. It does hallucinate from ti

Re:Oh dear, more layoff. Didn't see that one comin

[Rosco P. Coltrane]

It does kinda suck for support people , but the reality is, these big transformer neural networks actually seem to give better support than most human support I've found.

Why is it that every time someone mentions that AI will displace people who will lose their jobs and struggle to make a decent living, someone else points out that AI does a better job.

That's not the point. It may or may not be true that AI does a better job (probably not today, probably will soon). All I said that I pity the poor bastards who will fall on hard times soon. There's no need to compare their performances with someone or something else to feel sorry for people whose job situation was probably a bit precarious to begin with, who are probably stressing hard over the coming of AI right now, and who will get kicked in the teeth very soon.

I'm not saying AI can be avoided. It probably can't. But the reality of what's happening will be felt by a lot of people and not in a good way, and that's sad. That's all I said. No value judgment on these people's performances.

Re:

[kmoser]

The majority of the time I contact a company via either phone or online chat it's because I need to speak with a human to resolve some technical or billing issue. This is something that AI will probably never be able to fully take all the way to completion because it either involves nuance that the AI simply won't be able to understand, or because no company in their right mind would allow an AI to make the decision to change a user's account settings, let alone make a billing adjustment in the customer's f

Re:

[sg_oneill]

I suspect you'll be surprised at just how much nuance these damn things actually understand. They are ridiculously good at understanding text, probably better than humans.

Re:

[kmoser]

Maybe, but will they be empowered to make changes to my account or bill based on their understanding? If not, then they're useless to me, except perhaps to determine which CSR to route me to.

Re: Oh dear, more layoff. Didn't see that one comi

[Bobknobber]

I suspect they will keep at least some humans in the loop for security purposes. The last thing a company like Zoom would want is their chatbot divulging confidential user data because some guy tricked the bot into thinking it was the system administrator.

Re:

[flyingfsck]

A change is as good as a holiday. There is a labour shortage everywhere.

Re:

[vux984]

It's going suck for the people trying to get support.
The bots just have the same answers as the search engines do, just with a layer of more irritating prose.

I wouldn't be talking to support if the answer was readily available in their forums & documentation by search. Yes, i know a LOT of support hours are basically talking to people who don't know anything, and refuse to help themselves, so I get that bot-support is going to be sufficient for a lot of people and good for the business.

But if I'm callin

Re:Oh dear, more layoff. Didn't see that one comin

[backslashdot]

Besides maybe travel agents, I don't see AI replacing anyone.

I got the perfect name for it...

[denis-The-menace]

Max ZoomRoom

Just Die Already!

[Anonymous Coward]

Why Zoom is still a thing!?

Re:

[flyingfsck]

Zoom works better than the worst so they have a market.

Information entropy

[phantomfive]

This sort of stuff concerns me, because all AI can do is expand on requests without adding information. For example, if I say, "Draft an email explaining to everyone that I will be late," the only information it can draft that is both true and relevant is that I will be late. The rest will either be nonsense or just filler or outright false.

I don't like to be at work and read a whole paragraph when a single sentence is sufficient.

That word

[Tablizer]

"Anthropic" sounds like a cold metal thing doctors jam up your ass

Re:

[Tablizer]

My hygiene is none of your business.

...you insensitive Claude

[UnixUnix]

*came here just to say this

Claude's authority and liability?

[misnohmer]

So the company will stand behind any statements, promises, or deals made by Claude, as a fully authorized representative of the company?

Great, AI enhanced Zoom fatigue!

[VeryFluffyBunny]

In the realm of virtual space, we meet,
With cameras on, our faces set so sweet.
But oh, dear Zoom, you've worn us thin,
A never-ending cycle, the fatigue sets in.

At first, you seemed like a splendid affair,
No commute, no pants, just sitting in our lairs.
But now, the charm has started to fade,
As we navigate the land of virtual charades.

Each morning, we rise with great ambition,
Ready to conquer the world, without transmission.
But alas, we're stuck in a digital haze,
With endless meetings that stre

Weasel Words Summarized

[eepok]

Zoom says Claude, a chatbot Anthropic launched in March, should help customer support agents by creating "better self-service features" that can help guide customers toward relevant solutions. It will also soon be able to surface necessary resources for agents while they're serving customers.

Translation: The chatbot will help solve problems that users should have been able to solve on their own. It will also help human customer service search for the same solutions should the human user get past the chat bot.

but Zoom will likely leverage the assistant to help it compete with other productivity apps

Translation: We understand that investors assume every popular tech thing needs to be integrated into every product, so we're willing to brand our chatbot as "AI" if it prevents investors from selling our stock.