AI capabilities in Zoho Workplace

Zoho Workplace integrates artificial intelligence across its suite of applications to enhance productivity and help you complete tasks with greater efficiency and accuracy. This guide walks you through the AI capabilities available across each Zoho Workplace application and learn about what they do, how to access them, and how to get the most out of them.

Understanding Zoho Zia

Zia is Zoho's native AI assistant, embedded directly inside each Workplace application. Unlike standalone AI tools that require you to copy and paste content back and forth between windows, Zia works from within the application you are already using. This makes it faster to get more things done.

Zia is available across Zoho Mail, Zoho Writer, Zoho Sheet, Zoho Show, Zoho WorkDrive, and Zoho Meeting, with capabilities tailored to each application's purpose.

Using Third-Party AI Agents in Zoho Workplace applications

For organizations that already use or prefer a specific AI provider, Zoho Workplace supports third-party AI integration through a Bring Your Own Key (BYOK) approach.

BYOK allows your organization's administrator to connect a third-party AI model — such as OpenAI's ChatGPT, Google Gemini or Anthropic Claude to enhance Zia's features using the API key provided by them. This means your organization retains control over which AI model is used and how it is billed, rather than relying solely on Zoho's built-in AI.

How to set up BYOK configuration? 

BYOK configuration is done at the administrator level. Admins can add their preferred provider's API key through the organization settings of each supported application. End users need not take any action once it has been configured.

Pre-requisites to get started with AI in Zoho Workplace

Before you get started with AI in Zoho Workplace, ensure you have the following:

• Admin access to Zoho Workplace - The permission to add or connect with AI in Zoho Workplace applications is allowed only for the admin or super-admin. If you do not have admin privileges, contact the admin of your organization to enable AI feature for the desired application.
• Accessibility to third-party applications - If you wish to connect third-party AI applications, you require their credentials to access them. Ensure you have permissions to retrieve the relevant keys from them.

AI capabilities in Zoho Mail

Zia for Mail integrates AI capabilities directly into the Zoho Mail's interface to support email composition, inbox management, and communication efficiency. It is available to all users once enabled by the administrator. You can also extend Zia's capabilities by connecting it with third-party AI models. The models you add to Zoho Mail will be listed when you open Zia and you can choose the relevant one.

The AI integration in Zoho Mail supports the following features:

• Generate email content - You can generate an entire email content from a single line of prompt. The generated content can then be edited, regenerated or adjusted for tone and length to suit your needs.
• Auto-suggest content - As you type, Zia offers smart sentence completions to help you draft accurate and professional emails quickly.
• Email summarization and other email actions - Zia summarizes lengthy emails and lets you act on them directly such as - adding them to tasks or notes, or using them as a basis for new content.
• Writing assistant - Zia checks your emails for spelling and grammar errors in real time and offers writing suggestions. This ensure your messages are clear and professional.

Zia's capabilities have also been extended to other applications within Zoho Mail. They are:

Zia for Zoho Calendar

• Create smart events - You can create calendar events by simply typing a short line using Zia's Smart Add button.
• Event title suggestion - Based on your calendar history, meeting patterns and what you type, Zia suggests contextual event title for your events.
• Event description generation - You can generate comprehensive event descriptions using a single line of prompt. The generated content can be edited, regenerated or adjusted for tone and length to suit your needs. 

Zia for Zoho ToDo

• Generate task descriptions - Zia for Zoho ToDo helps you generate task descriptions and automatically add subtasks under it using just the task's title as a prompt. 

AI capabilities in Zoho Cliq

AI in Zoho Cliq works differently from other Workplace applications. Rather than using Zia natively, Zoho Cliq supports AI through a ChatGPT extension that you can install and configure separately. This extension brings conversational AI capabilities directly into your messaging application.

How to set up the ChatGPT extension in Zoho CLiq

Getting started with ChatGPT involves the following steps:

1. Installing the extension - The ChatGPT extension for Zoho Cliq is available on Cliq's Marketplace. Administrators can install it for the entire organization or for specific teams.
2. Configuring the OpenAI tokens - Once installed, the extension needs to be connected to your OpenAI account using a secret key from the OpenAI platform. This can be done through the ChatGPT bot or the widget within Zoho Cliq.
3. Configuring the Personally Identifiable Information (PII) in the extension - To protect sensitive information, you can specify how the ChatGPT extension should handle any Personally Identifiable Information (PII) shared during interactions with the bot. 

The installed ChatGPT extension allows for the following functions:

• Ask ChatGPT - Search and explore any topic directly within Zoho Cliq without switching to a separate browser tab.
• Organize ideas - Use the ChatGPT bot as a brainstorming partner to quickly organize and structure ideas.
• Summarize conversations - Easily summarize conversations in a thread or even a file by simply asking ChatGPT to do it.
• Image generation - Generate realistic images using Dall-E based on a prompt or description.

AI capabilities in Zoho Office suite

Zoho Workplace's office suite - Zoho Writer, Zoho Sheet and Zoho Show - all include built-in Zia capabilities within each application. So, no installation or configuration is needed for end users to access these features. They help you generate content, analyze reports and create presentations efficiently.

For enhanced capabilities, each application also supports integration with OpenAI. Instructions for configuring them are available within the respective application settings.

AI capabilities in Zoho Writer

Zoho Writer's AI capabilities focuses on helping you generate cleaner content, check grammatical accuracy and maintain a consistent tone throughout the text.

You can integrate Zoho Writer with OpenAI using the steps given here.

The following AI capabilities are available in Zoho Writer:

• Draft and edit content - Generate and edit content using Zia's built-in capabilities. Apart from this, you can also use the ChatGPT extension for advanced writing assistance.
• Grammar check - Detect and correct grammatical errors in real time as you write. Grammar checking can be enabled or disabled from within Zoho Writer's settings.
• Plagiarism check - Scan your document for text similarities against content available on the internet. This ensures your writing is original.
• Summarize - Generate concise summaries of lengthy documents to quickly understand their key ideas. You can either summarize an entire document or a selected section.
• Translate - Translate your document into over 70 languages. Translation can be applied to a select section or an entire document

AI capabilities in Zoho Sheet

Zia in Zoho Sheet helps you handle data, right from cleaning and formatting to analysis and visualization. There are two AI-powered options available within Zoho Sheet:

Explore - The Explore option uses Zoho built-in AI to help with data analysis. It can perform three operations:

• Insights - This option analyses the selected data in your spreadsheet and simplifies it in the form of charts and tables. This helps you spot patterns and draw conclusions better.
• Refine - This option reviews your data for quality issues such as missing values, duplicate records, and columns with inconsistent data types, and suggests corrections.
• Format -The Format option analyzes the selected data and suggests formatting options such as conditional formatting, picklists, and checkboxes.

Ask Zia - Ask Zia offers intuitive support by answering questions about the selected data and generating desired values. You can either use Zoho's built-in AI or use the OpenAI extension for this. The following operations can be performed using this feature:

• AI bot: The selected AI bot answers any queries you raise about the selected data set.
• Generate option - The Generate option allows you either to generate a table or formula using the selected data in the spreadsheet.
• Explain formula - This option explains any numerical formula available in the spreadsheet to help you understand how the formula works. 

AI capabilities in Zoho Show

Zia in Zoho Show helps create complete presentations, design slides, generate custom images, and polish your slide content, with just a few clicks.

Zia's AI capabilities can be extended using the OpenAI extension. This requires you to configure OpenAI in Zoho Show. Follow the steps given here to do so.

The AI features available in Zoho Show are:

• Generate presentation - Generate whole presentations with a simple prompt and style instructions.
• Generate custom images - Generate custom images that you can use in your presentations using ZIa.
• Generate new slides - Generate slides that naturally fit your presentation theme using some simple prompts.
• Fill slide - AUutomatically fill an empty layout with content that matches previous slides.
• Enhance content - Rephrase and refine selected text, shorten lengthy passages, or convert content into bullet points for cleaner slide design.

AI capabilities in Zoho WorkDrive

Zoho WorkDrive offers a set of AI-powered features designed to enhance how you work with your files. This improves efficiency and makes it easier to fetch information and understand content faster.

The following AI capabilities are supported in Zoho WorkDrive

• Ask questions on files - Upload a file and ask Zia specific questions about its content. This lets you extract the information you need without reading through the entire document.
• Generate content - Provide a brief description and Zoho AI will generate relevant content for you.
• Generate images - Create images based on a simple text prompt directly within WorkDrive.
• Generate cover images for media files - Automatically generate cover images for your audio and video files.
• Comment suggestions - Receive AI-suggested comments on files to help you give meaningful feedback. Zia can also help rephrase, shorten, or punctuate your own comments.
• Translate comments - Translate file comments to make collaboration easier across different users.
• File summarization - Get quick summaries of files stored in WorkDrive so that you can grasp key points without reviewing the full content.
• File suggestion - Receive smart file recommendations based on your recent activity, reducing the time spent searching for documents.
• Audio and video transcription - Transcribe audio and video files automatically so you can easily search and access the information they contain.

AI capabilities in Zoho Meeting

Zoho Meeting uses Zoho's AI capabilities to generate transcripts and notes of meetings and webinars. This means you no longer need to take manual notes or replay entire recordings to find a specific piece of information. The key content will be captured and made accessible for you automatically.

The following AI capabilities are supported in Zoho Meeting

• Meeting and webinar transcripts — Zoho AI generates a full text transcript of your meeting or webinar, allowing you to search for and reference specific moments quickly.
• Smart keynotes — In addition to transcripts, AI-generated notes highlight the key points and action items from your meeting, making follow-ups more straightforward.

Follow the steps given here to enable transcripts of meetings and webinars

AI capabilities in Zoho Connect

Zoho Connect uses Zia, Zoho's AI assistant, to help you find information across your network and quickly catch up on long discussions.

The following AI capabilities are supported in Zoho Connect

• Natural language processing search — Zia NLP search lets you search across Feeds, Forums, Town Hall posts, and Tasks using natural, conversational queries instead of exact keywords.
• Summarize posts — Zoho Connect's AI generates quick summaries of long posts, so you can grasp the core context without reading the whole section.