Perfect Meeting Memory

We all know the power of note-taking: when done correctly, it helps us track all the important details and decisions while also aiding in onboarding our team and keeping everyone in the loop.

But when I’m on a discovery call, I want to create an experience, and excessive note-taking ends up either interrupting the flow of the call or giving a weird feeling of an interview instead of a collaborative environment. My go-to until now has been recording the calls, and then making a few bullet summary or a Loom to share with the team and create a common understanding. But nowadays, and thanks to the power of AI, there are much better ways.

I always dreamt of a tool that could search and summarize conversations, like direct access to my brain as a searchable database. Well, for calls, these now exist. They call it an “AI meeting assistant” and there are a few of them. The best ones I’ve tried are Fireflies.ai, Other.ai, and tl;dv, but there are new ones coming every day. The system is quite easy, they all record a transcript and then use GPT to analyze the transcript, create summaries, extract action items, or execute your prompts. The summaries are kind of okay, but they miss a lot of the point of the call and give you summaries about how the weather is or other casual conversations you have. So, to get better insights, it is crucial to prompt the AI assistant to get specific summaries. i.e., for sales calls, I use these two prompts:

Make a summary of what the client is looking for in this project in terms of scope and services. Highlight the key goal of the client and their definition of success in the context of this project.

Extract the following information and present it in bullets. The information should be supported and presented with quotes from the call: Desired Project Start and End Date, Budget, Number and Type of Pages, Integrations, Visual Direction, Key Project Goals considerations.

But besides this, you can also ask stuff about the call like “did they define a budget?” or “when are they ready to start?” to get back to it when you are crafting proposals. This, for me, is the most helpful part. Because instead of searching the whole transcript where you maybe touch on the same topic in different parts of the call, you can now just search for key answers across the whole conversation.

So why is this a game changer? The key part of this is that it allows us to have a shared understanding, which leads to better decision-making and more informed strategic planning. There is nothing lost in translation, there is nothing forgotten, it’s like having a perfect meeting memory.