So... you record you internal meeting, with possibly sensitive company information and upload it to some cloud. What could possibly go wrong?
erm, yeah-- In data security they say "safely stored in frankfurt"...?
Jamie: AI assistant that creates meeting summaries
31–40 of 60 posts
Re: Jamie: AI assistant that creates meeting summaries
#32Huh. So I've never taken meeting notes. I guess you write down some things people said. Do you then refer back to that later, or is it a memory aid thing? I don't feel like I'm missing anything, but equally the op has built a product to automate this, so it's got to be important in some contexts. Would like to know what I'm missing
I dont know how it would be possible to build anything reasonably complex with groups of people without taking meeting notes. Every single meeting would be everyone hallucinating what was said before in previous meetings, and lots of lying.
> I dont know how it would be possible to build anything reasonably complex with groups of people without taking meeting notes.
I don't imagine it is. I've never seen anything reasonably complex successfully built by way of meeting, notes or not. The actual work always happens when ideas are formally written down and iterated upon asynchronously.
> Every single meeting would be everyone hallucinating what was said before in previous meetings, and lots of lying.
Yup. Even with notetaking, that's all you can get out of meeting. You simply don't have immediate access to all the information you need (critical in complexity) in the heat of the moment to present useful thoughts, so anything that does come up is bound to be invalid anyway. Noting the invalid expression made during the meeting doesn't serve any purpose. As such, your notes are only as good as the trash that it is. It's a nice break from work, but that's about it.
Re: Jamie: AI assistant that creates meeting summaries
#33So... you record you internal meeting, with possibly sensitive company information and upload it to some cloud. What could possibly go wrong?
We briefly utilized a product similar to this, however the issues you mentioned remained and it was awkward to explain that meeting notes were going to some rando saas. The situation became even more embarrassing when it started joining arbitrary private meetings that were scheduled. We immediately got rid of it and won't again use another product like this.
Re: Jamie: AI assistant that creates meeting summaries
#34Sometimes a thing is valuable because you want to have it. But sometimes most of the value is in the act of creating it .
The act of writing notes with pencil and paper is a ritual that loads information into my brain. But I’m in my 30’s, and while I grew up around and constantly using computers, they were not so ubiquitous as to replace pencil and paper note taking ritual. I wonder what the next generation’s experience has been, is typing their ritual?
Re: Jamie: AI assistant that creates meeting summaries
#35Huh. So I've never taken meeting notes. I guess you write down some things people said. Do you then refer back to that later, or is it a memory aid thing? I don't feel like I'm missing anything, but equally the op has built a product to automate this, so it's got to be important in some contexts. Would like to know what I'm missing
I don't think every meeting needs notes, but there are three levels that I've found useful (as a dev). I don't take all of these at every meeting, but I make at least one of them at most.
- An email to the group summarizing my action items, which I also add to my own to-do list. This way, if someone thinks I'm supposed to be doing something, they'll usually reply to the email to let me know. This also doesn't need to be recorded during the meeting; it can happen shortly thereafter (but it's often more efficient to write it during).
- A list of useful bits of information that came up. "X is a thing; I should read more about it", "This person is working on Y; that's who to go to with questions", that sort of thing.
- An outline of substantial discussions and key decisions. I don't need to write down every word of a twenty minute discussion of what color to make the button, but it's handy to have a reminder that "There was an extensive discussion of the color of the button. The agreement was that it should be red." If I'm asked to take notes for a group, this is what I generally produce; I've never had any complaints.
Re: Jamie: AI assistant that creates meeting summaries
#36Yeah, uhm, I don't trust it.
Please stop joining important things to giant mystery machines, it's extremely annoying to watch.
Re: Jamie: AI assistant that creates meeting summaries
#37These types of features will make their way into every meeting product and be frictionless to the end-user where all they do is show up. Those in the middle will be squeezed out quickly. While an interesting concept, an AI has no point of view and can only summarize with the context given. It won't be able to assume the right person for the action item if not said, won't know who has what expertise if those aren't th…
In addition to this, I found with Otter and Gong that it doesn’t understand internal jargon very well. When you say “the fizzbuzz microservice is blocked by Istio” the note-taking is appalling - yet those are key to understanding the point being made.
Re: Jamie: AI assistant that creates meeting summaries
#38If you believe that hand-written notes improve your memory and comprehension, as I do, then the real value of this kind of tool is simply to make conversations searchable, and easily shareable.
https://journals.sagepub.com/doi/abs/10.1177/095679761452458...
Re: Jamie: AI assistant that creates meeting summaries
#39Another service which I found really good: https://otter.ai/
Re: Jamie: AI assistant that creates meeting summaries
#40Huh. So I've never taken meeting notes. I guess you write down some things people said. Do you then refer back to that later, or is it a memory aid thing? I don't feel like I'm missing anything, but equally the op has built a product to automate this, so it's got to be important in some contexts. Would like to know what I'm missing
FWIW, it's been shown that just the act of taking notes enhances the memory of the person doing it, whether they refer back to the notes at a later time or not.
As to the value of note taking in general, for devs, I equate it to telling someone to "put that in the ticket, don't verbally instruct what needs to be done". Documenting decisions made, who will do what, etc. can all be valuable and prevent needless discussions later about who's memory is correct about X (i.e. how something is supposed to function). Some people have great memories, but others do not, and even if you think yours is not in need of this kind of assistance, having something to reference back to can be a big help, especially when you can say something like "hmm, that's interesting, in my notes, I wrote down we decided to go with Y, but you are saying Z, when did that change?"
I should note that taking notes is a skill like any other, done poorly it can probably have the opposite effect of causing distraction and missing things that are being discussed.