Exciting Additions and Changes to Zoom Features for the NU System

The University of Nebraska (NU) System's Information Technology Services division (NU ITS) announces some exciting additions and changes to Zoom accounts for users at UNO, UNK, and UNL. These changes will go into effect on Jan. 14.

Zoom AI Companion

Zoom’s AI Companion feature is a generative AI tool that allows hosts to efficiently summarize meetings including next steps, helps participants ask questions without interrupting the meeting, and summarizes long discussions in the chat.

The NU ITS team has received many requests for access to use Zoom’s AI Companion feature throughout the past year. After conducting a small pilot and engaging with NU Legal, NU ITS will now be unlocking this feature at UNK, UNL, and UNO. By unlocking this feature at the account level, individual users will now have the choice to go into their settings and choose whether or not they would like to enable the feature for Zoom meetings that they create. The “AI Companion” button on the bottom menu will not automatically appear unless individual users choose to enable this option in their accounts.

As some users across the NU system choose to utilize the AI Companion feature, you may notice more of your meetings using the feature. Much like when you are a part of a Zoom meeting that is being recorded, you will receive a pop-up notification that you are joining a meeting where the host has chosen to enable the AI companion feature. Similar to how you indicate your acceptance of a Zoom meeting being recorded, you will click to indicate you are “ok” with the AI companion feature being utilized before you will be able to engage in the meeting.

If you are not comfortable with a meeting being recorded or using the AI companion feature, you should not click “ok” and, rather, you should exit the meeting and follow up with the host. The individual who created the meeting is who determines which Zoom features will be utilized, including recording and AI companion. After a meeting wraps up, the account the meeting was created from will automatically be sent an email containing the AI meeting summary, but participants of the meeting will not automatically receive the summary.

Some members of the NU community have chosen to enable other AI notetaking tools over the last year, such as otter.ai. By unlocking Zoom’s AI Companion at this time, NU is adopting it as its enterprise notetaking tool and other tools such as otter.ai will now be blocked from joining Zoom meetings. If you have previously used a notetaking service like otter.ai and would like help deactivating your account, please reach out to a NU ITS help desk at support@nebraska.edu or visit one of our walk-up locations.

Zoom Feature Retention

To allow for effective and efficient use of Zoom and its chat, cloud recording, transcript, and AI companion features, the UNK, UNL, and UNO instances of Zoom will all default to a 150 day retention. This timeframe is aligned to a standard semester so that faculty and students can complete activities throughout the duration of a semester without losing access to helpful recordings and relevant course activities that have occurred using Zoom.

An individual may change the default retention setting within their own Zoom settings, and may elect for either longer or shorter retention for certain Zoom activities. Hosts will receive an email before any cloud recording is automatically deleted from their account.

If a host wants to retain a cloud recording longer than 150 days in a platform other than Zoom, NU ITS recommends moving that video into our enterprise academic video platform, YuJa.

For steps on how to move Zoom cloud recordings to Yuja, visit documentation can be found on NUSupport for both manual and automatic moving of recordings.