UC San Diego AI Weekly · August 17, 2026

What's New in Your AI Tools

Zoom Voice Translator reaches general availability — Zoom's real-time spoken-language translator is now generally available in meetings, letting participants who speak different languages communicate without manual interpretation. It supports English, Chinese, French, Japanese, and Spanish, and integrates with existing AI-powered translated captions. Also in this release: My Notes gains quick-capture on iOS via Home Screen widget and Control Center, and Zoom Phone calls can now activate real-time transcription with speaker-attributed captions that save automatically to the My Notes hub.

Domain Exclusion gives admins more control over Copilot web grounding — Admins can now exclude specific domains from Copilot's web-grounded responses, so certain sites will not be used as source material when Copilot pulls information from the web. This is useful when you want to block competitor sites, unreliable sources, or internal domains from influencing AI-generated answers. The feature was updated in early August with refinements based on early feedback.

Copilot Notebooks now works with Markdown, plain-text, and rich-text files — You can now bring READMEs, wikis, logs, transcripts, and rich-text files into Copilot Notebooks alongside the documents you already use. This means more of your existing project material can serve as context for Copilot without reformatting. If your team keeps notes in Markdown or exports transcripts as plain text, those files now work directly in the notebook experience.

New connected apps are coming to Gemini — Gemini is rolling out the ability to connect external services so you can plan, create, and manage tasks in one place. New integrations include productivity tools like Granola and Otter.ai for meeting summaries, Wix for website editing, OpenTable and Ticketmaster for bookings and events, iHeartRadio and Pandora for music, and Angi, Thumbtack, and Zocdoc for home and health services. Connecting is optional and can be turned on per service in Gemini settings. Also this week, Google announced Gemini 3.7 Flash, a new model with stronger coding and document-reasoning capabilities now available to Pro and Ultra subscribers in Gemini chat.

📼 AI Webinar #6 — One Year of Innovation with TritonGPT: Past, Present, and Future — This recorded session reflects on TritonGPT's launch and showcases features like MyDocuments, model switching, chat searching, and chat link sharing, plus strategies to stay engaged with AI topics on campus. Watch the recording on the TritonAI webinars page.
📼 AI Webinar #5 — Lean Six Sigma and Artificial Intelligence — This recording explores how AI tools like TritonGPT can complement Lean Six Sigma workflow optimization, with real-world examples and impact data from campus teams.
📌 AI Foundations in UC Learning — The self-paced AI Foundations course covers core AI concepts, UC policy, and where AI genuinely helps in higher education. Available to anyone on campus through UC Learning.

National Data Platform Receives NSF Category I Award to Expand AI-Ready Data Infrastructure — UC San Diego's National Data Platform has received an NSF Category I award to expand AI-ready data infrastructure across the U.S. The project aims to make research data more accessible and usable for AI-driven discovery, strengthening the foundation that campus researchers rely on for machine learning and analytics work.
Five UC San Diego Innovators Nominated for First UC Regents Innovation Awards — Five UC San Diego faculty and researchers are among the inaugural nominees for the UC Regents Innovation Awards, which recognize translational research with real-world impact. Several nominees' work intersects with AI and computing, reflecting the campus's growing role in turning AI research into deployed solutions.