Zoom Engagement Analysis Patent Could Walk Privacy Line

Zoom wants to make sure you’re closing. 

The company filed a patent application for “engagement analysis between groups of participants.” Zoom’s tech relies on a trained model to pick out which meeting participants spoke the most, and who stayed on mute. 

The filing specifically notes this tech’s usefulness in the context of sales teams, as they “often dissect and analyze such sales meetings with prospective customers after they are conducted,” Zoom said in the filing. “Within a sales context, of particular importance is whether or not the customer or prospective customer is ‘engaged’ during the meeting.”

After a meeting ends, Zoom’s tech transcribes the audio and extracts individual phrases spoken by each participant. The system then groups those phrases into two distinct speaker groups: each representing one organization, team, or company.

The system then calculates engagement metrics for each speaker within those groups, measuring things like amount of times spoken and speech duration, questions asked, response times, and topic relevance. Those metrics are translated into an engagement score for both the overall meeting and each participant. 

It adds up that Zoom would seek to patent such tech. As AI has taken the tech industry by storm, the company has spent the past year and a half launching machine learning and AI-powered productivity tools, including an AI collaboration platform called Zoom Workplace and a note-taking tool called Zoom Docs. 

But a productivity tool like the one this patent describes often walks a fine line when it comes to employee privacy, said Phil Libin, co-founder and CEO of AI startup studio All Turtles and video presentation app mmhmm. While tech like this could be useful in the context of employee training, it could easily verge on invasive depending on who the engagement metrics are presented to. 

For example, if those metrics are given over to the employee who took part in the meeting to improve their performance, then Zoom’s tech could be greatly beneficial. However, if these metrics are handed over to supervisors — or used to automate processes such as performance reviews — then it could be cause for concern. “I could see it going in both directions,” said Libin. 

The way it goes could depend on whether or not a tool like this is created with “beneficence,” said Libin, or in the best interest of a fully-informed user. “If a user was fully educated and informed about what this was doing and why it was doing it, would the user want this to be done?” he said. “I think that’s what determines whether something is worthwhile.”