Zoom AI Companion Review: Is It Worth It in 2025?
The AI meeting assistant market has exploded with promises of effortless note-taking and perfect meeting summaries. Zoom, the platform where millions spend their workday, launched AI Companion to compete directly with specialized tools.
But after analyzing hundreds of real user reviews, community discussions, and hands-on testing, the picture that emerges is far more complex than Zoom's marketing suggests.
What Is Zoom AI Companion? The Complete Feature Breakdown
Zoom AI Companion isn't a separate app; it's a generative AI assistant built directly into the Zoom Workplace platform. The feature set spans across virtually every Zoom product, from meetings to team chat to phone calls.
What are Zoom AI Companion’s Meeting Features?
Meeting Summaries generate post-meeting overviews with key points and action items using your audio transcript, screen-shared content (via OCR), and chat messages. However, these summaries require cloud processing through third-party AI models from companies like Anthropic and OpenAI.
Smart Recording breaks cloud recordings into chapters, highlights important sections, and extracts next steps. This only works with cloud recordings, raising immediate privacy concerns for sensitive meetings.
In-Meeting Questions let you ask the AI what you missed without interrupting the conversation. While useful in theory, users report that the feature often provides inaccurate or irrelevant responses.
Voice Recorder creates meeting summaries for in-person meetings, but requires manual setup and doesn't offer real-time transcription like specialized tools.
Agentic Capabilities proactively suggest which meetings to skip, automatically detect and track action items across the platform, and provide meeting preparation assistance.
Cross-Platform Note-Taking across Google Meet and Microsoft Teams through the Custom AI Companion add-on ($12/user/month). The AI joins meetings on these platforms as a visible bot participant that must be invited to each meeting.
Beyond meetings, AI Companion extends to Chat Compose for drafting Team Chat messages, Email Compose for Zoom Mail, and Sentence Completion across text fields. There's also Whiteboard Content Generation for brainstorming and Virtual Background Generation for custom meeting backdrops.
Some features, like real-time voice translation and photorealistic AI avatars, are also on the product roadmap.
The breadth is impressive, but as we'll see, this wide scope comes at the cost of depth and reliability in core use cases.
Is Zoom AI Companion Free?
Zoom markets the AI Companion as “included at no additional cost" with paid plans, but this framing obscures the true expense.
Base Requirements: You need a Zoom Pro, Business, or Enterprise account starting at $16.99 per user per month. The free Zoom Basic plan doesn't include any AI features.
Custom AI Companion Add-on: For meaningful customization, custom agents, or third-party integrations, you'll pay an additional $12 per user per month—bringing your total to nearly $30 per user monthly.
Hidden Limitations: Many features are disabled by default and require admin activation. Some advanced capabilities aren't available in certain regions or industry verticals due to compliance restrictions.
How Does Zoom AI Companion Handle Your Data?
According to Zoom's official documentation, here’s how Zoom AI Companion handles your sensitive meeting data.
1. Your Data Leaves Your Device
AI Companion processes audio transcripts, screen-shared content via OCR, chat messages, and user prompts through external AI models. This means your confidential conversations are sent to and processed by third-party companies, including Anthropic and OpenAI.
2. Multi-Vendor Processing
Zoom uses what they call a "federated approach" to AI, dynamically routing your data to different AI providers based on the task. While this may improve results, it also means your sensitive information touches multiple external systems, each with its own security practices and potential vulnerabilities.
3. Compliance Implications
Zoom AI Companion's cloud processing creates serious problems for compliance-sensitive organizations. Major institutions are actively blocking these features or creating separate HIPAA-compliant instances without AI capabilities.
UC Irvine explicitly states that "Zoom AI Companion is not available for any users under the UCI-HIPAA Zoom instance" and warns it "should never be used in any meeting involving discussion of sensitive or protected information." For healthcare providers, legal firms, and financial services companies, this effectively makes AI Companion unusable for their most important meetings.
Is Zoom AI Companion Actually Worth Using?
We analyzed hundreds of user reviews across Zoom's community forums, Reddit, G2, and Gartner Peer Insights, plus tested it ourselves across different types of meetings, and here's what we found.
1. Accuracy Problems
Meeting summaries frequently misinterpret context and change the meaning of what was actually discussed. The AI often elevates minor side comments to major discussion points while completely missing critical decisions that determine project outcomes.
In technical discussions or meetings with industry-specific terminology, the system struggles significantly with complex subject matter. This creates serious business risks when summaries are shared with stakeholders who weren't present, as they may receive fundamentally incorrect information about what was decided.
2. Reliability Remains Inconsistent
Even when AI Companion functions properly, users cannot depend on consistent performance. Important meetings sometimes generate no summary at all, with no error message or explanation for the failure.
The system requires manual workarounds that defeat its automation purpose. Teams must assign multiple people to save transcripts manually because data is regularly lost if meetings close before manual intervention. This unpredictability makes the tool unreliable for business-critical meetings.
3. No Offline Functionality
Zoom AI Companion requires constant internet connectivity and cloud processing. This creates significant limitations for users in areas with unreliable internet, secure environments that restrict external connections, or traveling professionals who need meeting intelligence regardless of connectivity status.
5. No Real-Time Transcription
Unlike dedicated meeting assistants, AI Companion still lacks live transcription during meetings. Users cannot catch important names, technical terms, or key decisions as they happen.
The post-meeting summary approach leaves excessive room for error in fast-moving or complex discussions where context matters most.
Read more about how to transcribe Zoom calls automatically.
6. Multi-lingual Performance Issues
While Zoom supports transcription in multiple languages, AI Companion's summarization quality degrades significantly with non-English content. Teams conducting mixed-language conversations or working in international environments report substantially reduced accuracy and utility.
7. Inconsistent Action Item Extraction
Action item identification frequently misses genuine tasks while flagging irrelevant comments as actionable items. The AI sometimes creates entirely fictional action items that could lead to confusion or wasted effort if team members attempt to follow through on non-existent assignments.
8. No Custom Vocabulary Training
AI Companion cannot learn company-specific terminology or industry jargon, leading to consistent transcription errors in technical meetings.
Unlike specialized tools that adapt to organizational vocabulary, users remain stuck with generic AI that misunderstands their professional context.
9. License and Cost Management Complexity
Managing the AI Companion across teams becomes cumbersome quickly. Since features require paid Zoom accounts, organizations must track which users have access, manage license allocations, and deal with cost escalation as teams grow.
Adding the Custom AI Companion for cross-platform functionality means potentially doubling the per-user cost to nearly $30/month, making it expensive for larger teams compared to dedicated alternatives that offer flat-rate or free options.
Want to see how other AI notetakers stack up on pricing? Check out our detailed comparison guide.
Looking for a Better Zoom AI Companion Alternative? Meet Hyprnote
Hyprnote is a privacy-first local AI notepad for meetings, and here’s why it’s a superior alternative for most users seeking reliable AI meeting assistance.
1. Complete Data Control
Unlike Zoom's cloud processing, Hyprnote runs entirely on your device using local AI models. Your sensitive conversations never leave your computer, making compliance with HIPAA, GDPR, and other regulations straightforward.
This local-first approach eliminates the privacy risks inherent in multi-vendor cloud processing.
2. Superior Accuracy and Reliability
Hyprnote offers flexible AI model options—you can use the custom HyperLLM-V1 model for faster local processing, connect to your preferred cloud providers like OpenAI or Anthropic, or run other local models through Ollama.
Plus, with AI Autonomy controls, you can fine-tune exactly how much the AI enhances your notes—from conservative edits that preserve your original structure to full autonomy that completely transforms raw notes into polished summaries.
3. Universal Platform Support Without Bots
While Zoom AI Companion now works across platforms but requires visible bot participation, Hyprnote captures audio from any meeting platform—Zoom, Teams, Google Meet, or in-person conversations—without joining as a participant.
You're not locked into a single vendor's ecosystem, and there's no disruption to meeting dynamics.
4. No Latency Model
Hyprnote provides live transcription during meetings and can generate instant summaries and action items once the meeting ends.
You can also use AI chat to ask natural language questions like, "What are my action items?" or "What exactly did Sarah say about the budget?" and get instant answers without scrolling through pages of text.
5. Enterprise-Ready
For organizations needing on-premise deployment, private cloud options, or hybrid setups, Hyprnote's Enterprise plan provides complete deployment flexibility alongside SSO integration and smart consent management features.
You get complete control without vendor lock-in or cloud processing risks, with the ability to deploy exactly where your data governance requires.
5. Exceptional Value
Unlike Zoom's paid-plan requirement, Hyprnote offers unlimited AI summaries and transcription completely free, along with the ability to connect your own speech-to-text and language models, calendar integration, meeting search, and basic AI chat functionality.
The Pro version at $8/month adds unlimited chat with your notes, unlimited custom templates, annotation capabilities, floating recording controls, and advanced meeting detection.
For enterprises, Hyprnote provides custom pricing with 24/7 priority support, secure team sharing, SSO/MFA authentication, smart consent management, customizable UI, and custom workflow builders—features that would cost hundreds per user with other enterprise AI platforms.
Final Recommendation: Should You Use Zoom AI Companion?
Use Zoom AI Companion if:
Your meetings involve simple, straightforward conversations
You're comfortable with cloud-based data processing
Basic post-meeting summaries meet your needs
Your team operates entirely within the Zoom ecosystem
Choose an Alternative Like Hyprnote if:
You need meeting intelligence that works offline or in secure environments
You want to avoid bots disrupting client meetings or sensitive conversations
You're tired of paying per-user fees that escalate quickly across teams
You need custom AI models or want control over which AI processes your data
Your meetings involve technical terminology that generic AI consistently misunderstands
You require on-premise deployment or hybrid cloud setups for compliance
You want real-time transcription instead of waiting for post-meeting summaries
Download Hyprnote for macOS to experience meeting intelligence that costs nothing and compromises nothing (iOS app and Windows version coming soon!).