Comment by Andugal a day ago
> I’m actually having a really hard time thinking of an AI feature other than coding AI feature that I actually enjoy.
If you attend a lot of meetings, having an AI note-taker take notes for you and generate a structured summary, follow-up email, to-do list, and more will be an absolute game changer.
(Disclaimer, I'm the CTO of Leexi, an AI note-taker)
When I was a founding engineer at a(n ill-fated) startup, we used an AI product to transcribe and summarize enterprise sales calls. As a dev it was usually a waste of my time to attend most sales meetings, but it was highly illustrative to read the summaries after the fact. In fact many, many of the features we built were based on these action items.
If you're at the scale where you have corporate intranet, like Confluence, then yeah AI note summarizing will feel redundant because you probably have the headcount to transcribe important meetings (e.g. you have a large enough enterprise sales staff that part of their job description is to transcribe notes from meetings rather than a small staff stretched thin because you're on vanishing runway at a small startup.) Then the natural next question arises: do you really need that headcount?
I thought it was so I could go back 1 year and say, 'I was against this from the beginning and I was quite vocal that if you do this, the result will be the exact mess you're asking me to clean up now.'
What is the problem?
Notes are valuable for several reasons.
I sometimes take notes myself just to keep myself from falling asleep in an otherwise boring meeting where I might need to know something shared (but probably not). It doesn't matter if nobody reads these as the purpose wasn't to be read.
I have often wished for notes from some past meeting because I know we had good reasons for our decisions but now when questioned I cannot remember them. Most meetings this doesn't happen, but if there were automatic notes that were easy to search years latter that would be good.
Of course at this point I must remind you that the above may be bad. If there is a record of meeting notes then courts can subpoena them. This means meetings with notes have to be at a higher level were people are not comfortably sharing what every it is they are thinking of - even if a bad idea is rejected the courts still see you as a jerk for coming up with the bad idea.
Accurate notes are valuable for several reasons.
Show me an LLM that can reliably produce 100% accurate notes. Alternatively, accept working in a company where some nonsense becomes future reference and subpoenable documentation.
You show me human meeting minutes written by a PM that accurately reflect the engineer discussions first.
I agree, and my vision of this is that instead of notes, the meeting minutes would be catalogued into a vector store, indexed by all relevant metadata. And then instead of pre-generated notes, you'll get what you want on the fly, with the LLM being the equivalent of chatting with that coworker who's been working there forever and has context on everything.
Is Leexi's AI note-taker able to raise its hand in a meeting (or otherwise interrupt) and ask for clarification?
As a human note-taker, I find the most impactful result of real-time synthesis is the ability to identify and address conflicting information in the moment. That ability is reliant on domain knowledge and knowledge of the meeting attendees.
But if the AI could participate in the meeting in real time like I can, it'd be a huge difference.
If you are attending the meeting as well as using an AI note-taker, then you should be able to ask the clarifying question(s). If you understand the content, then you should understand the AI notes (hopefully), and if you ask for clarification, then the AI should add those notes too.
Your problem really only arises if someone is using the AI to stand in for them at the meeting vs. use it to take notes.
I'll pretend you asked a few questions instead of explaining my work to me without understanding.
1. "Why can't you look at the AI notes during the meeting?" The AI note-takers that I've seen summarize the meeting transcript after the meeting. A human note-taker should be synthesizing the information in real-time, allowing them to catch disagreements in real-time. Not creating the notes until after the meeting precludes real-time intervention.
2. "Why not use [AI Note-taker whose notes are available during the meeting]?" Even if there were a real-time synthesis by AI, I would have to keep track of that instead of the meeting in order to catch the same disagreements a human note-taker would catch.
3. "What problem are you trying to solve?" My problem is that misunderstandings are often created or left uncorrected during meetings. I think this is because most people are thinking about the meeting topics from their perspective, not spending time synthesizing what others are saying. My solution to this so far has been human note-taking by a human familiar with the meeting topic. This is hard to scale though, so I'm curious to see if this start-up is working on building a note-taking AI with the benefits I've mentioned seem to be unique to humans (for now).
But that isn't writing for me, it is taking notes for me. There is a difference. I don't need something to write for me - I know how to write. What I need is someone to clean up grammar, fact check the details, and otherwise clean things up. I have dysgraphia - a writing disorder - so I need help more than most, but I still don't need something to write my drafts for me: I can get that done well enough.
In my company have a few "summaries" made by Zoom neural net, which we share for memes on the joke chats, they are so hilariously bad. No one uses that functionality seriously. I don't know about your app, but I've yet to see a working note taker in the wild.
I've used multiple of these types of services and I'll be honest, I just don't really get the value. I'm in a ton of meetings and I run multiple teams but I just take notes myself in the meetings. Every time I've compared my own notes to the notes that the the AI note taker took, it's missing 0-2 critical things or it focuses on the wrong thing in the meeting. I've even had the note taker say essentially the opposite of what we decided on because we flip-flopped multiple times during the meeting.
Every mistake the AI makes is completely understandable, but it's only understandable because I was in the meeting and I am reviewing the notes right after the meeting. A week later, I wouldn't remember it, which is why I still just take my own notes in meetings. That said, having having a recording of the meeting and or some AI summary notes can be very useful. I just have not found that I can replace my note-taking with an AI just yet.
One issue I have is that there doesn't seem to be a great way to "end" the meeting for the note taker. I'm sure this is configurable, but some people at work use Supernormal and I've just taken to kicking it out of of meetings as soon as it tries to join. Mostly this is because I have meetings that run into another meeting, and so I never end the Zoom call between the meetings (I just use my personal Zoom room for all meetings). That means that the AI note taker will listen in on the second meeting and attribute it to the first meeting by accident. That's not the end of the world, but Supernormal, at least by default, will email everyone who was part of the the meeting a rundown of what happened in the meeting. This becomes a problem when you have a meeting with one group of people and then another group of people, and you might be talking about the first group of people in the second meeting ( i.e. management issues). So far I have not been burned badly by this, but I have had meeting notes sent out to to people that covered subjects that weren't really something they needed to know about or shouldn't know about in some cases.
Lastly, I abhor people using an AI notetaker in lieu of joining a meeting. As I said above, I block AI note takers from my zoom calls but it really frustrates me when an AI joins but the person who configured the AI does not. I'm not interested in getting messages "You guys talked about XXX but we want to do YYY" or "We shouldn't do XXX and it looks like you all decided to do that". First, you don't get to weigh in post-discussion, that's incredibly rude and disrespectful of everyone's time IMHO. Second, I'm not going to help explain what your AI note taker got wrong, that's not my job. So yeah, I'm not a huge fan of AI note takers though I do see where they can provide some value.
We've had the built-in Teams summary AI for a while now and it absolutely misses important details and nuance that causes problems later.
I'm not a CTO so maybe your wold is not my world, but for me the advantage of taking the notes myself is that only I know what's important to me, or what was news to me. Teams Premium - you can argue it's so much worse than your product - takes notes like "they discussed about the advantages of ABC" but maybe exactly those advantages are advantageous to know right? And so on. Then like others said, I will review my notes once to see if there's a followup, or a topic to research, and off they go to the bin. I have yet to need the meeting notes of last year. Shortly put: notes apps are to me a solution in search of a problem.
You do you.
I attend a lot of meetings and I have reviewed the results of an AI note taker maybe twice ever. Getting an email with a todo-list saves a bit of time of writing down action items during a meeting, but I'd hardly consider it a game changer. "Wait, what'd we talk about in that meeting" is just not a problem I encounter often.
My experience with AI note takers is that they are useful for people who didn't attend the meeting and people who are being onboarded and want to be able to review what somebody was teaching them in the meeting and much much much less useful for other situations.
The catch is: does anyone actually read this stuff? I've been taking meeting notes for meetings I run (without AI) for around 6 months now and I suspect no one other than myself has looked at the notes I've put together. I've only looked back at those notes once or twice.
A big part of the problem is even finding this content in a modern corporate intranet (i.e. Confluence) and having a bunch of AI-generated text in there as well isn't going to help.