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So... you record you internal meeting, with possibly sensitive company information and upload it to some cloud. What could possibly go wrong?
This has been the norm for the past decade.
Huh. 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.
Most formal meetings start with approval of the minutes of the previous meeting.
Sometimes 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?
A few ideas & learnings if they can help.
1. If you focus on a specific domain of conversation, you can pull conversation data and "summary" into a more valuable data structure. For sales it might be identifying the Decision Maker, budget or launch date. Project meetings will have budgets, timelines, approvers etc as well.
2. My thesis was that getting data into a structured format was more interesting than summary. Sales people need to enter their data into Salesforce. Sales people hate doing this and do it poorly. It's valuable if an application can process the recorded conversation into a completed SFDC record/object.
3. It might be possible to rely on the user to prompt the application correctly in the conversation. In a project management scenario, the user might want to collect launch_date as a field. The user would ask, "When is the launch date?"
The response might be, "I don't know, we're thinking about March or maybe April or even May."
The user of the application can then repeat. "OK, let's pencil in the launch_date for April 15th."
During onboarding or setup for this type of conversation and data extraction, the user would set these keywords like "Pencil In" to then save the date mentioned in the conversation.
Anyways, that's what I remember. If any of that is interested or you want to see any old notes and wireframes, hit my email.
Huh. 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've always took notes because I cannot remember anything in detail after a weekend. Taking notes doesn't have to be painful, for me it's just one `diary` command away and it will open/create the appropriate note file in my favorite editor: I've also packaged it as a pip package for distribution: https://github.com/Aperocky/diarycli
Most tools are great at the minutes, but cannot have the context to do 'notes'
AI will never replace jobs that require real human care or intent. We don't want an AI taking care of us when we're sick, though they'd probably be very good at it. Business notes may be a nice case, but notes taken by someone who cares about the project is going to be better than the AI's, even if the AI does a better job, because the care o the person taking the notes is evident.
These 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.
One big cohesive company AI could extract topics from documents and appropriately cue the other AIs in the system with keywords to ensure that internal jargon is understood.