Unveiling the Game-Changing Zoom Update: What’s New for the NU System!

Information Technology Services (ITS) division of the University of Nebraska (NU) System is thrilled to announce some innovative additions and modifications to Zoom accounts for users at UNO, UNK, and UNL. These modifications will take effect on January 14.

Zoom AI Companion

The AI Companion feature in Zoom is a generative AI tool that empowers hosts to effectively summarize meetings, including subsequent steps, assists participants in asking questions without interfering with the meeting, and condenses lengthy discussions occurring in the chat.

Throughout the past year, the NU ITS team has had numerous requests for access to Zoom’s AI Companion feature. Following a limited pilot program and discussions with NU Legal, NU ITS will now enable this capability at UNK, UNL, and UNO. By enabling this feature at the account level, users will have the option to access their settings to determine if they want to activate the feature for the meetings they organize. The “AI Companion” button in the lower menu will not show up automatically unless users choose to activate this option in their profiles.

As some users within the NU community opt to utilize the AI Companion feature, you may observe a growing number of meetings employing this functionality. Similar to when you participate in a Zoom meeting that is being recorded, a pop-up notification will appear informing you that you are joining a meeting where the host has opted to enable the AI companion feature. Just like agreeing to a meeting being recorded, you will need to click to confirm that you are “ok” with the use of the AI companion feature before you can actively participate in the meeting.

If you feel uncomfortable with a meeting being recorded or the AI companion feature being used, you should not click “ok” and instead exit the meeting and follow up with the host. The person who scheduled the meeting is responsible for deciding which Zoom features are used, including recording and AI companion. After the meeting concludes, an email containing the AI meeting summary will be sent automatically to the account that organized the meeting, but other participants will not receive this summary automatically.

During the last year, several individuals in the NU community have chosen to enable alternative AI notetaking tools such as otter.ai. By enabling Zoom’s AI Companion at this time, NU is designating it as its primary notetaking tool, and other applications like otter.ai will now be restricted from joining Zoom meetings. If you have previously utilized a notetaking service like otter.ai and need assistance in deactivating your account, please contact a NU ITS help desk at support@nebraska.edu or visit one of our walk-up locations.

Zoom Feature Retention

In order to support effective and efficient usage of Zoom along with its chat, cloud recording, transcript, and AI companion functionalities, the instances of Zoom at UNK, UNL, and UNO will all have a default retention period of 150 days. This duration aligns with a standard semester, enabling faculty and students to complete activities during the semester without losing access to valuable recordings and relevant course activities conducted via Zoom.

Individuals may alter the default retention setting within their personal Zoom settings and can opt for either a longer or shorter retention for specific Zoom activities. Hosts will receive an email notification before any cloud recording is automatically removed from their account.

If a host intends to retain a cloud recording beyond 150 days on a platform other than Zoom, NU ITS recommends transferring that video to our enterprise academic video platform, YuJa.

For guidance on how to transfer Zoom cloud recordings to YuJa, documentation is available on NUSupport for both manual and automatic recording transfers.