Zoom, the video conferencing company, has unveiled Zoom Docs, a collaborative document creation tool that it hopes will compete with the likes of Google Docs and Microsoft Word. The product will feature Zoom’s artificial intelligence (AI) assistant, AI Companion, and other AI capabilities to help users draft, edit, and summarize documents, as well as answer questions about the content. Zoom Docs will be integrated into Zoom’s platform, allowing users to work on documents from its meetings, chat, desktop, and mobile apps. The product is set to be released in spring 2024, and pricing details have yet to be determined.
While Microsoft and Google dominate the market for workplace content creation apps, Zoom aims to disrupt the space with its new offering. However, experts believe it would take significant change to shift users away from the established market leaders. Microsoft currently holds an 83.5% share of the authorship and email market, while Google has a 15.6% share. Zoom may try to leverage its large user base in video conferencing to encourage adoption of its word processing tool. In the second quarter of 2023, Zoom reported 218,100 enterprise customers, a 7% increase from the previous year.
Zoom Docs will allow users to easily collaborate on documents within the Zoom platform, eliminating the need to switch between tabs or apps. Users can pull information from meetings, chats, emails, and project management tools into their documents, create customized layouts and workflows, tag colleagues, assign tasks, track and manage projects, and add tables, charts, and images. The aim is to provide a comprehensive set of features that make users more productive and address evolving work needs in the future.