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I like how AI note takers are basically converting the useless act of a meeting into an email because an email is a better product that someone can reference.
If you meeting needs to be converted into an email to make it useful maybe you should just write more emails and have fewer meetings.
If it can be summarized into an email without anyone else’s input, it was a bad meeting and should’ve been a mail to start with. A good meeting is not about transferring freely available info, but about discussion and decision making.
The communist presidential candidate in my country has a live interview in one hour. Just in time for the metrics work meeting that could have been an email.
This will be fun.
…virtual note takers? we don’t even write our own fucking notes anymore?..
edit:
Okay, okay, I get it :D AI indeed has some uses.
Turning meetings into emails in the least efficient manner
You get meetings and emails! Just imagine the productivity!
Once you get high enough in corporate hell, all work is meetings and e-mails about meetings. There is nothing else.
Ngl, it’s actually pretty handy.
Really don’t know why you’re getting downvoted. Getting a transcript and summary of an hour long meeting that you weren’t at is so much easier than relying on someone taking and sending you notes.
Here, you can use mine. hands you my notebook full of furry porn sketches and stories
Ohh, you actually pay attention at meetings? Oof. … So what do you think of my latest character?
Why does it have three…? You know what, never mind.
I mean, I’ll take that notebook. Pass it over.
If you get sufficient value out of a 30 second summary of an hour long meeting, then why have the hour long meeting?
(h)(n) + (t)(p) = W
(h length of meeting in hours) x (n number of people in the meeting) + (t number of hours prepping the meeting) x (p number of people prepping the meeting) = W number of work hours spent on this meeting. Multiply W by the average hourly wage. That’s how much money the meeting cost. And that doesn’t factor in the cost of productivity loss because everybody could’ve been doing something useful with that time instead.If it could’ve otherwise been ten minutes of writing an email and five minutes per worker reading and understanding it, then how is it anything other than an efficiency gain to just make that meeting an email? Instead, we’re still putting the meeting together just to then pay in resources and possibly subscription cost to have the meeting summarized instead of just having the host do it in the first place.
Just an off-the-cuff example, a business review with a client. I’m involved in making the deck that’s being shown, so I already know the talking points from our side; the only thing that’s relevant to me is the client’s response. The meeting might be 45 minutes of us presenting and 15 minutes of them responding, so if I can get a quick summary of those responses, I can save all that time.
Sure, but you know how else you could give that information to the client and have them respond back?
By emailing the deck and asking for their thoughts.
We don’t really need to coordinate having an hour window in everybody’s schedule anymore.
Reading through a random deck is not remotely the same as watching a presentation
Because this user didn’t attend. Meetings are generally long form and dynamic. Which can’t be done as efficiently in email. 30-60 minutes meetings are fine to attend in person (in terms of parsing information). Consuming that same information via video after the fact is a chore; as is relying on the note taking skills of another employee. I agree with the user you’re replying to. Note taking is one of the few things AI is decent at.
Okay, but imagine if everybody just didn’t attend. If the quick notes summarizing the meeting are enough for everybody, then the meeting is a waste of time.
If nobody attended, what would be getting summarised? I get what you’re saying, I’ve definitely been in organisations that had pointless meetings. “This meeting could have been an email” is a meme for a reason. Others though, it’s where different departments come together and share news/status, different executive/managers give run downs and updates about the company (e.g. chief of ops presents figures and areas that could be improved) and employees can ask questions about these or other pertinent topics.
I find the summaries pretty worthless but a transcript is super useful
This is all very true, and I agree completely. But you’ve overlooked two very important factors that I can think of:
- Many people attending these meetings do not have the authority to cancel them, and the people who do have the authority may not be receptive to this argument.
- Some people will benefit from assisted notetaking even if the meeting was worthy of the time.
I’m neurodivergent and when I’m writing notes my brain shuts off audio processing. I literally can’t take notes without missing more of the meeting than I’m writing down. And unfortunately most people above me in the hierarchy can’t fathom writing a message instead of speaking for an hour.
If I could trust it to consider the same points important that I do and have the same understanding of them.
They merely report what was said, nothing (much) more, nothing less.
Literally one of the only good apllications for AI.
Really?? All the AI note takers I’ve seen suck farts.
The fans can just use regular air from the room to cool the computer. You don’t actually need to fart into them.
yeah. I had a 5 hour QBR this week with 18 in-person attendees and 7 virtual where we didn’t even take a pee break. I was presenting 90% of it so it’s hard to take my own notes. I give AI the transcript, the virtual note taker, and the slide deck and my personal notes and describe how I want the output and it gives me a recap of the highlights, discussion, action items that then I can email to stakeholders and to project mgmt to set up next step tasks in Asana.
The one benefit of AI I’ve actually found useful.
at my last client’s they used SAFe, which basically means they do “big agile”. in practice, this meant that every tenth week was “meeting week”. five days of only retrospectives and planning meetings, including a friday all-hands with over 400 engineers at once. i wish we had virtual note takers that worked.
“So I’m going to need every 10th week as a vacation… I’m out of vacation days? Well regardless, I’m not showing up.”
that’s the fun part about working in old european industry: we get six weeks, but everyone has to take them at the same time, and at that time the factory just… shuts down.
Oh wow that really sucks.
could be worse
You ever listen to a whole meeting? Not for me!
Transcribing meetings is quite useful if you want to quickly check something later on.
Summarizing that is useful to get the gist of it if you missed the meeting.
A real hero would start talking about viagra and car insurance, and get the meeting emails flagged as spam.
Just start reading subject lines from spam emails.
“You’ve won $10,000! – Horny women in your area! – Real Casino Viagra Casino Bitcoin Casino Viagra! – There’s a package awaiting your confirmation!”
Something like my dick is so hard right now that I can barely steer the car right?
Gift cards as well
How about including mention of wanting to start a union or union activity with everyone in the group and how you are all wanting to join forces as ‘workers of the world uniting!’ … then read as much Karl Marx text as you can in 30 seconds.
Management would love to see those flags on their alerts from everyone in the office.
especially with your name attached.
maybe start with “hey, i’m Michail Bakunin, filling in for chris, and i’m here today to talk about syndicalism”
🤣🤌🏼 See? It’s just this sort of shit that kept me from locking in on the cubicle monkey grind — not for lack of trying, but for how I contributed. 😜
Example: once upon a time, there was a merger of two massive telecom brands (let’s call them “Orange” and “Blue”) and one was being subsumed entirely over the course of a year or so — including its complete customer database. Now, most of these accounts were simple enough to update & port, but someone up top decided to draw a line at a certain value and lump together alllll the accounts that were under that floor. Something about not wasting money on pros’ hours for subprime, IIRC.
Long story short, it took me no time at all to write a script that did exactly what mgmt told us to do ( ~ “zero out all accounts within a certain range on either side of $0.00 via refund or extinguishment”), but since I was paid by the hour and mgmt got bonuses for how well their teams were doing, I made sure my little slop of code didn’t outpace the other teams on the floor. I didn’t take into account how absolutely mind-numbingly challenging it is to be in a cubicle for 8+ hrs/day with nothing at all to do…
Oh, and to further obfuscate my automation, I set it up on a few office mates’ computers, too. Pretty soon, the whole team was secretly automated and straight up bored AF, so we kinda just took longer and longer lunches, more frequent smoke breaks, shared our music libraries, etc., but kept up the “barely above average, yet dedicated wage slaves” act in front of mgmt.
Imagine my face when it was not accolades we received once the jig was up. 🤣🖕🏼 Ooohwhee, were they pissed.
Sounds like they should have been paying you appropriately enough to care
Play it again, Sam…
Nobody would bet an eye you would do this in Europe.
using an ai for inside meeting is totally safe and secure, and totally not a gdpr nightmare
I work for a company that must remain gdpr compliant, and when joining (ms teams) meetings you can’t unmute your mic or share content without agreeing to a massive AI waiver.
Sounds like a great reason not to use it.
I never accept the terms. If people ask why I’m not talking I write “I can’t accept the AI conditions” in the meeting chat.
Nice, I assume most people would get annoyed though.
Kinda off-topic, but am I the only one who usually joins meetings five minutes early? I hate being late, and that way I give myself five minutes of peaceful troubleshooting time if my mic doesn’t connect, for example.
That would annoy me, since Teams shows a “meeting started” popup when the first person joins a meeting.
Sounds like a(nother) Teams issue.
but wouldn’t then people understand that the meeting has not yet begun? it’d be like a door opening at x:55 when the class starts at x+1:00, an open invitation to start gathering but the official start is in 5 minutes as scheduled
Sometimes people take other people joining early as a cue that the meeting starts early, so there’s a chance I’d miss stuff. Our company is very good with meetings actually making sense, so missing 5 minutes can be quite annoying.
okay question because i don’t know if i’m out of touch with corporate culture or just not american- are you amarican?
because afaik in Europe it’d be considered rude to begin a meeting before a scheduled time, unless everyone who was supposed to be there is there and agrees that they’d like to start early
No, I work in Germany.
huh! it’s spreading. i’d personally think it’d be rude to start before the scheduled time without everyone present
I have all that turned off. A new chat pertaining to the meeting is added to the list of chats, but I don’t see that unless I’m looking at the Teams window.
You might have it turned off, but do the other participants?
No idea, but they have the option, just like me.
I’m hyperpunctual too, but I stopped doing this when Teams started pinging all invitees as soon as the first person shows up, because now showing up 5 minutes early just means the meeting is 5 minutes longer.
I go for not being the guy to start the meeting, but being prepared to join the second someone does.
Man, just do it like the rest of us and join on time. Then realize you forgot to do sth/take a break/whatever and just claim the 5 minute troubleshoot time claiming your mic doesn’t work, while you go to the toilet.
Yeah, they would wait for me in most meetings. In 75% of the meetings I participate in, I’m a key person and have to provide meaningful information, some of it based on the discussion in the meetings. If I had “mic issues” in them, they’d want me to start showing up early to address them before the meeting. And thus we’re back to square one.
Back to back meetings has entered the chat
If you’ve already made sure the mic and camera are working, you don’t need to enter the 2nd meeting 5 minutes early to make sure they work.
I almost always see the message “x has started the meeting. Join?” About 5 to 10 minutes before a meeting where x is any of many people, so you’re not unusual
I join exactly on time, though I get to the audio/video check a few minutes early to ensure my camera is live and the audio has chosen my headset not the camera microphone
You may indeed be the only one.
I show up a couple minutes late because this should have been an email.
True. Some folk don’t work. They send appointments.
Always in exactly 2 minutes early. 5 minutes early always forces me to have awkward small talk with someone, usually the organizer.
2 minutes is great. 30 seconds to get in, 1 minute for mic/sound check, 30 seconds left not long enough to have more small talk than hellos.
Five is already pretty late for me. I’m in the meeting 10 prior so my status changes. Camera is off, I’m preparing for the meeting, but it’s good to be ahead of the game.
What do you do when you have consecutive meetings?
If the first one matters more than the second, I’ll leave when the first one is done. If the second one is more important, I’ll say “I need to prepare for another meeting. If there’s any other business, email is best.” and leave to be in my next meeting.
2 cameras, face to face. And you go to the movies.
I work in government, and some dumbass in the city sends one of these things instead of attending meetings, and gets pissy when I kick it out of the room.
Those emails it sends are open-records discoverable.
“How much is Chris making in Q2 by being trapped on a sinking ship?”
If the ship is a metaphor for today’s world affairs, I’d say record profits!
Ahhh Google Meet. In the corporate world when we see a company using Google Meet we assume they are cheap and we will need to really talk discounts etc with them. It’s sadly normally true.
Funny. In the tech world we see zoom vs google meet as zoom is for people who have exclusively soft skills I don’t want to talk to anyway. When I see a google meeting I know I’m going to be talking to someone useful.
Depends on what part of the company you are dealing with - in engineering we’re usually a bit annoyed when anything other gets used simply because meeting software clients for Linux are either shitty or nonexistent.
Jitsi.
I tried to make Jitsi happen, but given that majority of out customers and vendors have google workspace there is little incentive to not use meet.
You could always keep it open for internal usage, or offer it as a backup for when Cloudflare oopsies the internet or smth. It’s how we did the meeting that should have been an email at where I work, the day Clownstrike hit.
Why virtual note takers? Why waste computing power?
It is very handy
Handy, yes. But anything more than a single note taking AI is literally redundant. Why not single note taking agent?
LET THEM FIGHT.
Those note takes don’t actually take into account anything said before the meeting begins.
