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Comment by macNchz | Hacker News Reader

I find AI meeting transcripts and summaries to be one of the most genuinely useful things to come out of this era of LLM tools. Being able to see a quick summary of what was decided or who was supposed to do what next is just so helpful, either for refreshing your memory after the weekend or just because people aren’t all that great at taking and sharing notes.

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I prefer to take succinct notes on paper or eInk and cut the noise while I’m on the meeting. I’m better focused, keep the meeting to what really matters. A colleague sent me one of those summaries, it didn’t make sense. For me it can’t replace a good system, precise notes and useful on point meetings. Maybe for people who have useless meetings they must attend it’s better ?

It's nice if you're the one presenting or leading the meeting, and/or if the person you've asked to take notes is not especially diligent. I've also been sent a photograph of someone's handwritten notes after a meeting and found it...not terribly useful.

Yes you’re right. The handwritten notes I take I always keep them for myself. If I have to share something I clean it and summarize and type it by hand. I find useful to do it manually to make sure intent and comprehension are well transcribed from the meeting. If a person is not focused on the meeting then it could be worse. I’d rather not give this to an AI, again often context is key and unless you have access of month or years of cross history it might be difficult for an IA not to miss something. But it’s just a tool, everyone sees what tool fits nicely

Indeed.

That does sound generally useful. Out of interest: Do you ever see a one hour meeting being summed up so brief that the participants question why they spend an hour on the meeting (or more realistically, question if the LLM understood the meeting at all).

Even when meetings are summed up, which I think they should be, you frequently see that no real progress was made, someone did all the work before the meeting started and this is now just a one hour sign off, or everything is simply pushed to the next meeting.

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