Jamie: AI assistant that creates meeting summaries
meetjamie.ai
meetjamie.ai
This is cool, but sometimes you want only a summary, sometimes you want a clear list of decisions and actions (with owners), and sometimes you literally want a word-for-word transcription of who said what.
I've seen wildly varying company cultures regarding their approach to note taking. I worked for a company once where the SVP and above folks were treated as kind of god-kings, where every word they spoke had to be written down and agonized over. Felt like those guys following Kim Jong-un around with little notebooks. Even something casually mentioned would become a real project with dozens of staff, just because it was uttered by a SVP during a meeting once. Other places I've worked barely took any notes, and your team's priorities and expected work was passed around by word of mouth like a terrible game of telephone. Everywhere is different!
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 there, and is limited to words spoken. I'm sure in the future big tech companies will run their own AI models (if not already) to supplement this knowing. Definitely not worth what the offering is today at $37/mo for a few bullet points that takes seconds to write.
The main value of any note taking, summarization, and creative act in general is the process. Not the output.
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.
But sometimes most of the value is in the act of creating it.
I just type into org-mode. The notes are rarely useful later, but I keep them in a folder that I can grep through.
Imagine, at the rate of wokeness, any joke or non factual piece of information you present is now searchable via text or even related terms.
Now imagine your boss or HR person doesn’t really like you and needs an excuse to get you in trouble. They’re few queries away from finding something that from some angle can make you look like a monster.
Better just to say as little as possible.
This has been the norm for the past decade.
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.
https://journals.sagepub.com/doi/abs/10.1177/095679761452458...
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
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'
1. Decisions and supporting details
2. Action items with dates and assignees
Those should be sent out to all attendees of the meeting (or written in a place that's accessible to everyone). Beyond that, each person needs to take notes for themselves for other things they want to remember.
Every single meeting would be everyone hallucinating what was said before in previous meetings, and lots of lying.
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.
Most formal meetings start with approval of the minutes of the previous meeting.
- 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.
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.
I mean, to be clear, these will be strictly less valuable than human-generated notes.
But on the other hand, I think they'll be strictly more valuable than no notes.
And as someone who has a terrible time trying to both note-take and participate in a meeting at the same time, this seems like it could be super helpful.
I would like a tool like this that made a summary/notes and included the full transcript, so they could be searched. This would be good for people who attended and those who didn't, or for seeing if something was discussed a while ago.
Ideally the same system would work on zoom calls, in person meetings, and in meetings with both (some in person, some on zoom). For me the hybrid workplace is one that has the advantages of both, not one that is either/or.
https://github.com/Aperocky/diarycli
It's a pip package and by installing you can invoke the `diary` command to directly edit the day's note or diary (as long as the python package bin are in your shell PATH). You can also configure location where they are stored or the shell editor you want to use.
Digital, if you want to go a bit modern; with speech-to-text postprocessing if you want to go modern.
As far as selecting salient points from the transcript goes, the ancient tech of "Copy" and "Paste" usually does the job just fine.
Debatable, what if...
- there are not enough doctors to see patients
- it meant I could be seen immediately vs having to wait 1+ hours
- my doctor had instant access to all medical knowledge and the wisdom of 1M+ hours of practice
- there is a pandemic where a robot is much easier to sterilize between patient visits
There are people already willing on a personal / social level to see an artificial doctor, doctors are already incorporating AI into their practice to help reduce errors, it's hard to believe it will never happen. The context of the visit or stay will play into acceptance
An actual argument might be that it can't fully replace my own notes because my own notes can, and sometimes do, include notes about my thoughts and opinions that the AI can't possibly know without being told. But that does not negate the possible value in terms of freeing me from taking notes about what was actually said during the meeting.
With respect to being taken care of: I want to be taken care of in whichever way produces the best outcome for me. If that means care handled by an AI, then I want the AI.
But in highly technically important meetings, y'all might want to proofread in case the wrong TLA gets used.
Please stop joining important things to giant mystery machines, it's extremely annoying to watch.
Definitely doesn't have to be pen-and-paper but organized notes help me focus and keeps continuity of context, whereas my natural tendency is not to record things into my brain very well.