Here’s the issue. I frequently have grant committee meetings where I’m so busy writing stuff down, I’m not really aware of what was said. Also due to executive functioning issues I can forget stuff. So I’ve had to piece it together from my hasty notes afterward. Also I may have trouble trying to remember whether we discussed something specific.
An example of this would be if I asked for a list of community partners we could reach out to for letters of support. People will bombard me with information while I try to write it all down, then after the meeting I’ve got a list of six partners when I’m thinking more like twelve were mentioned.
I recently found a potential solution to this, called Pocket. It seems like it’s just a basic recorder with AI note-taking features. You turn it on, you record, it gives you a written version and summary of your meeting.
I don’t anticipate anyone would mind me using this, we record Teams meetings quite often.
I am concerned about a couple things:
Confidentiality. Not that anything is super top secret in these meetings, but we do discuss strategic planning and mention employees by name when we’re talking about various funding opportunities. I don’t really trust AI to be confidential in general. What I’m most concerned about is whether or not the federal government could subpoena my meeting notes to then use against us in some BS way. If that sounds crazy paranoid then you’re probably not aware of how bad things have gotten for nonprofits under the current Trump administration. Recipients of federal awards are under very close surveillance right now and have been threatened with prosecution for doing liberal things the government doesn’t like. It’s extremely dystopian.
I just generally don’t like AI. I use Claude at work but I feel like this is just more AI creep into every facet of life. I don’t know if I should be encouraging this sort of thing. I’m sure all this data will be sold to someone and I just don’t like it.
There was a third thing I can’t remember.
Anyway, I’m not sure what is really the alternative? Obviously a simple recorder would work, but I’d have to summarize it all myself, and realistically I probably won’t have time to listen to it all a second time and try to fill in the gaps. But if it’s easy to navigate I might be able to find specific parts of the recording. Does anything like this exist that is not extremely shady?
Any other ideas? Must I just carry on with incomplete information?
It’s become very common in medical situations to have AI take notes. Then the doctor has to correct mistakes and flesh things out a bit, but i gather it’s much faster than taking notes directly. (Although i did once see a doctor who was a very good typist and wore his notes in real time.)
I teach proprietary classes, both virtual and in-person, and we have had to be much more specific about prohibiting both recording (audio or video) AND the use of AI note-taking applications. We’ve had people come back after classes and ask us questions that were obviously based on a weird interpretation of the lecture portion. We strongly believe the problem was AI-related. (We also notice people using AI note-taking in virtual classes, especially since the apps notify the class presenter that it is being used.)
Do you have an approved AI at work that’s secure? If so, just digitally record the meeting, upload your sound file to that AI, and have it summarize or whatever you want to do.
FWIW, I’m an officer in a guild in World of Warcraft, and we use an AI to take notes and summarize our meetings (conducted over Discord) and it does an absolutely stellar job. This is one of those situations where I would be willing to welcome our AI overlords.
Same, but at work for me. We have a standard note taking service provided and it’s an absolute godsend. It not only saves the call audio and transcript, it creates notes to share out with to-dos and next steps for each participant. Plus it provides daily and weekly summaries of everything I’ve committed to and allows me to ask intelligent questions about any or all of my past meetings.
From a personal coaching standpoint, it also tells me when I’m on a monologue and/or when I start getting negative reactions from people. Gives me some tools to course correct on the fly rather than deep diving into something that loses everyone’s attention.
Many states require what is called “two-party consent” for all audio recording, meaning everybody being recorded must be notified (as opposed to “one-party consent” where any participant can unilaterally decide to record). If you are in one of those states, you must make sure you comply with the law. “We record Teams meetings quite often” does not count as notification.
As you allude to in your point #1, your employer is likely to have very strong feelings about keeping records like this outside of approved channels. Organizations often have policies about keeping records for a minimum amount of time and automatically deleting them after a certain time. There are also often policies about not sending organization data out to any unauthorized third-party services - data might leak due to the service being hacked, there might be fine print in their user agreement allowing them to use what you upload for whatever purposes they want, or the provider might be subject to the control of an unfriendly government. You should absolutely not use an outside service of your own choosing for something like this without very clear written permission from someone at your employer who has the authority to grant it.
No, but, “I’m recording this meeting to make note-taking easier. I have just turned on the recorder” at the start, and, “I’m turning off the recorder” at the end, is explicit and I’m pretty sure it meets every state’s law. Like that little message you always get with phone support, “this call is recorded for training purposes”. That’s why they tell you, to comply with state laws
I’ve been in exactly one meeting where I was aware of AI taking notes. I reviewed the notes afterward. It missed the word “not” in someone’s opinion on an issue, effectively assigning the reverse opinion.
It can be useful if you already know the information and can fact check it. It can be very wrong if you have to assume it is a valid source of the information.
I do know that if I attempted to connect a Zoom meeting at my previous employer to an unsanctioned AI note-taking service not provided by the mothership, I’d be fired so fast I’d leave burnmarks on the carpeting.
I don’t know if the company procured an enterprise-wide service for stuff like that; I retired before it got to that point.
Are you concerned about them subpoenaing your Teams conversations? Are you saying things markedly more confidential in your in person meetings than your Teams meetings? If no, it feels like the horse has already left the barn.
If you want ease of compliance, I believe all the major online meeting tools now have an offline notetaker mode. You can just use the same Teams workflow to capture conversations in both mediums and keep it in a central place.
AI scribe software provides summaries - shortened (abbreviated) versions. In any other context it would be referred to as a shortcut. Shortcuts are typically a backfire waiting to happen. And speaking of context, these scribes are not good at including context, so translations/summaries can be iffy, if not dead wrong. The tech community refers to this as hallucinations. I suppose that’s supposed to sound better than error prone.
Some scribes appear to be more accurate than others and generally it seems to be a case of you get what you pay for. With some, the level of support can be wanting if you run into problems. File storage security can be an issue if uploaded to ‘the cloud’.
No question these scribes are far better than they first were. On the other hand I have software that’s been under continual development for decades, yet still, quite often ‘upgrades’ seem more like a downgrade.
They’ve become quite common within the medical community because, what doctor has time to truly pay attention to what a patient is decribing to them (that’s sarcasm). As well, medical doctor does not = computer expert.
I guess scribes have their place. I wouldn’t place 100% faith in them.
We have an AI recorder / transcriber built into our chat platform. It’s great. I’m often in highly technical meetings and people tend to ramble or refer to systems or people I’m not familiar with so it’s nice to be able to go back over those notes.
I take my own notes as well though. Sometimes it’s hard if I’m presenting or facilitating the session.
We’ve got the usual Teams/Copilot pair, and it’s pretty handy for transcribing meetings. I can then go back and have it summarize the transcription, identify next steps, deliverables, etc…
Or if it’s a meeting I’m just listening in on and not paying a whole lot of attention, I can have it generate me a summary so that I can read it later if I need to.
Of course all this useful stuff is only as useful as often as I remember to actually click the transcription button…