Sembly (formerly Powow) is a SaaS platform from the company of the same name in New York City, that helps to make meetings more effective by using proprietary AI algorithms to transcribe and analyze meetings, transforming them into actionable insights.
$0
per month per user
Zoom Workplace
Score 8.5 out of 10
N/A
Zoom Workplace, Zoom’s open collaboration platform with an AI Companion, empowers teams to be more productive, and strengthen customer relationships throughout the customer lifecycle with Zoom’s Business Services for sales, marketing, and customer experience teams, including Zoom Contact Center.
Powow is well suited for meetings, multi-meetings, and having everyone in the team involved. It simplifies the process of decision-making and any process within our business that needs multiple people working at the same time. It allows people to focus on the meeting instead of taking notes as Powow uses audio transcription to create summaries about everything said. It also allows getting relevant insights and analytics that are really helpful for the business. In my own case, being a fashion and design store requires hand on meetings and work that can't be done thru the internet. Also, for very important meetings or information, you can't really rely on the transcripts as they are not perfect. Even though Powow is relatively new, it has mainly positive aspects.
In most cases, and I mean almost all, Zoom is vastly superior to Teams in terms of functionality and ease of use. Case in point: I recently tried to join a Teams meeting in the web browser, and it took me multiple attempts to access it. This NEVER happens with a Zoom link.
Audio quality of phone calls is spot on. Calls are clear and crisp.
Video quality of video meetings are clear and there aren't any pixelization artifacts that some systems can have.
Having AI summaries have been life changing for us. We no longer have to concentrate on note taking, like we did in the past. The summaries are accurate and enable us to put our efforts in the meeting or conversation. Plus, we can save them into our practice management system as required.
Allow a way to group individual people chats - not channels just individual peeps into groups for ease of finding - like how you can group shared calendars into sections in Outlook
We're sticking with Zoom for the foreseeable future--given its compelling feature set, ease of use, and advanced technology, there's just no other competition to be excited about. Plus it's a Gartner-recognized industry leader, so it's a rather easy choice.
Zoom is made for the non tech office. It has features that can be made to do what you need to run things on a day to day basis. Immediately we we able to get meetings going with remote employees. The ability to be able to add smartphone connected people was a big plus. Zoom met our needs at the time.
There have been less than a handful of outages during our two years with Zoom, and whenever there was one, an email informing us of the outage went out immediately, and they had the issue resolved shortly thereafter.
Zoom has among the best performance of any video conference platform, as I've mentioned several times. Besides that, their Chat platform works great, and their back end always runs smooth. It's unfortunate that reporting can now only be done by one month at a time, but nonetheless, it only takes a second to run any kind of Zoom report, whether it's an attendee report, Poll results, a user report, a list of meetings from the past month, etc.
Because I got a response right away, and was assigned one specific individual to work with me from the beginning to the resolution. I had an actual email address and direct contact with this person without having to start over and over every time I contacted Zoom - this singular individual remained attentive and was well informed on the subject matter and quite able to resolve my needs.
If you receive any pushback from higher ups, point to any of the various positive reviews like this one. Or show Zoom's excellent Gartner report, or articles describing Zoom's partnership with Sequoia capital. It's not difficult to show how Zoom is a trustworthy industry leader with best-in-class technology.
Even though all of the mentioned platforms are helpful for meetings and teamwork, Powow is so much better. First, it allows multi-meetings, facilitating the job of the managers and heads of every team to be involved in all the work done. Also, it has audio transcripts that avoid the need for note-taking, making people pay full attention to the meeting. Provides as well insights and analysis related to the business and meeting content that are really helpful for the business. The AI component to extract patterns and sentiments across multiple meetings is a huge tool for managers and heads of teams to identify key issues and mitigate risks.
Zoom Workplace is typically on the more expensive end against other options, but it's the industry leader for a reason. It has the most brand credibility by far, but that doesn't mean it's perfect. There are limitations when it comes to technical performance, customization and video/audio quality. I prefer Slack myself for communication apps, but Zoom Workplace is a good alternative.
The billing and price model is really fair for so many functions that they offer, our remote work requires each of the features that Zoom offers, so accepting payment for a tool like this is the least we can do. I like that billing arrives on time and that they offer opportunities and payment times.
Because the Basic licenses are completely free, and because it's very easy to configure and install Zoom, and because anyone can join Zoom from a link without needing an account, scaling is a Breeze. There are absolutely no roadblocks. My company keeps adding more Zoom Pro license every week since it's so in demand. We were able to convert users from several different platforms onto Zoom with no trouble at all.
Zoom is perfect for our business. We use it to video chat with prospective clients. The name recognition alone gives us credibility and it is very easy to screen share and send content out.
We have not lost much productivity in our teamwork during the pandemic because of the ability to have Zoom video calls and keep everyone in touch. This is definitely a positive.
We are able to have more people participate in coaching sessions (described earlier) because we don't have room space limitations. This is a big positive.
Being able to start a meeting instantly is great when we are doing support and/or training with a client over the phone and need to be able to share a visible
