Skip to main content

These new Zoom features take on Teams and Outlook in a serious way

Zoom shared at its Zoomtopia event on Tuesday details about its new business services, which will include Mail and Calendar clients in addition to Team Chat, Whiteboard, Phone, and Meetings options.

Zoom will soon make its Mail and Calendar offerings available as a beta release, in an effort to compete with brands such as Google and Microsoft, which already have established mail and calendar services, for both general and professional customers. These include Microsoft 365 and Google Workspace. Notably, Zoom’s in-house expansion comes as both Microsoft and Google place a greater focus on their professional services.

Zoom has announced its Mail and Calendar clients, which will soon be available in beta.
Image used with permission by copyright holder

Zoom plans to have the Mail service work similarly to Microsoft Outlook, adding that the service is end-to-end encrypted. In conjunction with the Calendar, they are the flagship product of the suite. The Mail and Calendar products will then work with other features, including Team Chat, Whiteboard, Phone, and Meetings, in a single program so that users won’t have to leave the Zoom platform in order to complete their work.

Recommended Videos

With this model, Zoom aims to increase productivity, and maximize security for its end users, many of which are small businesses that might not have adequate IT staff to maintain intricate email servers, the brand noted.

Please enable Javascript to view this content

“The Zoom Mail and Calendar Services (beta) are targeted at small-to medium-business customers who particularly value email privacy,” Zoom head of product Joseph Chong said in a company blog.

The brand is also confident that potential clients might find their new options viable because many are likely using Zoom as their video conference option already, The Verge noted.

Having a Calendar feature built into Zoom will make it easier to save and find your Zoom links for upcoming meetings, among other housekeeping tasks.

In addition to the beta features, the brand also announced Zoom Spots, which is a feature that urges workers on a video conference to communicate with their cameras enabled. The feature is set to roll out in early 2023.

Another upcoming feature is Zoom Virtual Agent, which is an A.I.-powered chatbot set to help customers with immediate issues. It will also be available in 2023.

Fionna Agomuoh
Fionna Agomuoh is a Computing Writer at Digital Trends. She covers a range of topics in the computing space, including…
Perplexity’s two new features take it beyond just a chatbot
An abstract image showing floating squares used for a Perplexity blog post.

Perplexity AI, makers of the popular chatbot by the same name, announced Thursday that it is rolling out a pair of new features that promise to give users more flexibility over the sorts of sources they employ: Internal Knowledge Search and Spaces.

"Today, we're launching Perplexity for Internal Search: one tool to search over both the web and your team's files with multi-step reasoning and code execution," Perplexity AI CEO Aravind Srinivas wrote on X (formerly Twitter). Previously, users were able to upload personal files for the AI to chew through and respond upon, the same way they could with Gemini, ChatGPT, or Copilot. With Internal Search, Perplexity will now dig through both those personal documents and the internet to infer its response.

Read more
Zoom debuts its new customizable AI Companion 2.0
overhead shot of a person taking a zoom meeting at their desk

Zoom unveiled its AI Companion 2.0 during the company's Zoomtopia 2024 event on Wednesday. The AI assistant is incorporated throughout the Zoom Workplace app suite and is promised to "deliver an AI-first work platform for human connection."

While Zoom got its start as a videoconferencing app, the company has expanded its product ecosystem to become an "open collaboration platform" that includes a variety of communication, productivity, and business services, both online and in physical office spaces. The company's AI Companion, which debuted last September, is incorporated deeply throughout Zoom Workplace and, like Google's Gemini or Microsoft's Copilot, is designed to automate repetitive tasks like transcribing notes and summarizing reports that can take up as much as 62% of a person's workday.

Read more
Copilot Wave 2: Here are all the new AI features to try out
Copilot Pages open in a graphic.

Microsoft has announced an update to Copilot, the company's all-in-one AI assistant. "Wave 2," as Microsoft calls it, is a series of updates that gives Copilot more capabilities within popular Office applications, Copilot agents for businesses, and even a new feature called Copilot Pages.

Let's start with Pages first. Microsoft calls it a "dynamic, persistent canvas" that's designed for "multiplayer" collaboration, built right into Copilot. Microsoft has been busy integrating Copilot into most every application imaginable, but think of Pages as a way of allowing you to get more done without having to ever leave Copilot itself.

Read more