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Why focus on AI meeting transcripts if the real problem is bad meeting prep?
- houseatrielah 3y agobad meeting prep isnt obviously productizable
- ashfernandez 3y agoI created this tool to test this question by making it super easy to use gen AI to prepare a good agenda directly through an extension on the side of your calendar. I noticed that I was in a ton of pointless meetings. Some were recorded, but I’d never go back and look at the recordings because the meetings were a waste of my time. I realized the common theme was none of these meetings were prepared well or at all. One could look at meetings as a start-to-end process. AI transcripts and summaries are downstream of meetings. The problem is, if you have a bad meeting, you get bad AI transcripts and summaries - garbage in, garbage out. Why not apply AI at the start of the meeting process where meetings are first created? Make people think of what they want to get out of the meeting, what they want to discuss, and who actually needs to be there. In theory, this should result in people having: > Fewer, shorter, and more efficient meetings > High quality agendas with worthwhile talking points > Healthy discussions that lead to an actual outcome Therefore, the AI preparation tool should: > Know what you want to get out of the meeting - i.e. what’s the objective? > Use AI to create an agenda with relevant talking points to hit said objective > Make you think of who should talk about each talking point and invite only those people > Bonus points if it follows a repeatable structure and does all of this very quickly, which should totally be possible with AI What do you all think? Less AI transcription/summarization and more AI meeting prep?
- ollysb 3y agoIt makes sense in principle. I wonder if the incentives work though, usually the people that suffer from the bad prep aren't the same people that are responsible for prepping the meeting. It could perhaps work though if people were free to decline meetings which hadn't been prepped, that way if you wanted people to attend you'd have to do the legwork to make it worth their time.
- ashfernandez 3y agoMy theory is that if you enable all the attendees to give them feedback, they could start changing. I like the idea of declining a meeting if it's not prepared OR 'nudging' them to prepare ahead of time.
- vidarh 3y agoI love meeting recordings because they become an excuse that makes it easier to get out of pointless meetings... (so yes, I'd love anything that gatekeeps the creation of meetings in a way that ensures the meetings I get added to are actually worthwhile instead of having to work around it).
- ashfernandez 3y agoQuick question - do you watch the meetings you record?
- vidarh 3y agoNo, that's the point. And I don't record them - but when people record a meeting it makes it easy to pretend you'll watch them and so not show up unless it actually matters to you. I don't think I've ever watched a recording of a meeting.
- pvg 3y agoIf this is something you made and are looking for feedback, you can edit the title to put Show HN: at the beginning of the title which tells everyone they can discuss the thing being shown with the person who made it in the thread. It also makes it clear it's something people can try.
- ashfernandez 3y agoAh ok, will do that next time. Good suggestion!
- hartator 3y ago> Why not apply AI at the start of the meeting process where meetings are first created? Make people think of what they want to get out of the meeting, what they want to discuss, and who actually needs to be there. You mean something that now fits in an email?
- j4yav 3y agoNice, I worked on something similar during COVID but it was more about preparing and tracking needed discussions well enough that you don't have to have the meeting in the first place (company failed, open source code is at https://github.com/async-go/asyncgo https://github.com/async-go/asyncgo). We found that, at least at that time, companies fell into two camps - they were already doing async well and writing things down and didn't need us, or they were just desperately waiting for COVID lockdowns to end so they could get people back into meeting rooms - they don't see it as a problem, had never seen it work any other way, and so we couldn't solve it for them. If I can share anything or just talk through my experiences let me know. I think reducing time spent in nonsense meetings actually does make the world a better place for the humans in it, at least a little bit.
- ashfernandez 3y agoHey -- this is great. We should connect. Would love to pick your brain and understand what you learned. I tried accessing your website, but seems to be down(?). Let me know how we can chat - my email address is ashish.fernandez@meetrics.ai
- datadrivenangel 3y agoA well run meeting is a thing of efficient beauty. The problem, is most people don't actually want to run a good meeting due to either having to accept the risk of whatever they're trying to do actually happening or not, or the risk of having to do other people's work if they run a meeting about it.
- deleted 3y ago[deleted]
- ashfernandez 3y agohaha.. that's a whole 'nother issue
- 293j59234j9p 3y agoMy two bosses guarantee our team will never have a well-run meeting. They're both junior managers who were selected for immediate promotion when their managers left. Both of them will drift and ramble on new topics when we manage to complete an agenda ahead of schedule. I need to find a new team. Or maybe I could find new jobs for them and get myself promoted to their current job ...
- m1117 3y agoBefore each meeting, give them a sleeping pill
- nurbl 3y agoI had a boss once who did this, whenever a meeting was done before the scheduled time, he would start talking about some vaguely relevant experience or similar. When someone asked about this, he actually said that he felt responsible for not wasting everyones time, now that they were there anyway. I think he just liked having a captive audience.
- m1117 3y agoPrepared meetings are not fun and boring. They feel not awkward and could be just replaced with an email.
- tussa 3y agoWould be good to have a landing page to tell us what this does. Straight to the point and skip all this marketing PR jargon.
- ashfernandez 3y agoGreat suggestion. Gonna build a landing page directly for a demo vid.. or straight to the extension!
- coldtea 3y agoBecause it's easier. Corporations don't do things because they're better. They do things because somebody gets a promotion / comission / are easier / somebody bought some BS enterprise software.
- deleted 3y ago[deleted]
- bell-cot 3y agoReaction to headline: Because you can both (1) brag about your shiny new "AI" thingie, and (2) still avoid having to do good prep.
- EPWN3D 3y agoBecause no one has time to prep for meetings that probably aren't necessary.
- danielmarkbruce 3y agoAnyone who has a lot of meetings will tell you it's hard to remember what was said, what was promised etc. So people take notes but that's difficult. Transcripts are great.
- wharvle 3y agoI love transcripts because I basically can’t both take notes and actively pay attention (this was a huge problem with my trig and calc teacher in high school who insisted everyone take notes the entire class period and would get mad at you if she saw you not taking notes—I’d end the class with a bunch of pages of writing and no clue WTF any of it was about)
- tomjakubowski 3y agoYeah, it's like having a medical scribe around. Taking notes requires a different kind of attention than engaging in conversation, and the switching can be really difficult. Anyway, even with a software scribe, meetings should probably end with attendees reviewing and agreeing on some kind of written document which will be the meeting's artifact. You know, so people can refer to it later. Of course this never happens, because in meetings people get bored and tired and it's easier to just give everyone the Zoom wave and crawl to the sofa.
- magicalhippo 3y ago> this was a huge problem with my trig and calc teacher in high school who insisted everyone take notes I found at uni that well-prepared blackboard/overhead lectures were excellent for taking notes. I caught many small typos and misunderstandings as I would actively work through each step of the theorem/proof/problem as I wrote. In hindsight I realized they must have spent a great deal of effort in preparing the lectures precisely such that they were easy to write down. In contrast, the PowerPoint lectures we had was exactly like you describe. Either I could focus on writing stuff down, but then I couldn't really follow what they were saying, or I could focus on what they were saying but not write anything down. Either way I felt I was missing out, as writing stuff down made stuff stick magnitudes better. I attributed this to the fact that PowerPoint doesn't lend itself to be easily transferred to notes, so it requires a transcription step that detracts from the lessons.
- karaterobot 3y agoMeetings at my company are derailed by having a lot of Ph.Ds who cannot ask a question or make a comment without spending 5 minutes talking, usually repeating the same thing over and over in different ways. If I schedule a 25 minute meeting and write an agenda with three topics in it, we'll get through half of one topic in that meeting. So I plan to schedule 2x50 minute meetings on separate days. It's a catastrophic waste of time. And you can't ask people to submit questions or read documents or watch demo videos in advance, because they just won't do it. They'll say "my schedule is so full of meetings, I couldn't do the prep work". Well, it's full of meetings because we have 2x50 minute meetings to do what we should be able to do in one 25 minute meeting.
- spywaregorilla 3y agoThis comment applies to basically every category of people.
- blitzar 3y agoHang on I thought Ph.Ds were socially awkward people who were passive and silent in meetings only occasionally asking brief questions with no follow up, and seem like they would prefer to just do the whole meeting in 2 or 3 emails. I am not sure which stereotype to believe anymore.
- spywaregorilla 3y agoIf we really want to get specific, phds are generally trained to be comprehensive in their discussions, rather than concise, which is a slightly different flavor of annoyingly verbose from the typical incompetent communicator or individual who was trained to be rewarded for volume of "participation" more than anything (the latter of which tends to creep into org structures anyway)
- blitzar 3y ago> rewarded for volume of "participation" more than anything I can see you are well versed in corporate life.
- bearjaws 3y agoTheres a few reasons: 1. Even if you have a well run meeting, you should record it and transcribe it for searchability. 2. Ever worked with a third party? They probably suck at meetings, no matter how organized you are it won't matter.
- aantix 3y agoI would like meetings to be recorded, transcribed, screensharing portions should generated screenshots that are part of the notes. All of this data dumped in to Slack, so that it can easily be searched along with other conversations on the same subject.
- dathinab 3y agoOften the issue isn't even meeting prep, but the meeting itself. - presenting information: is often better in document form (if precise, concise, not fluf, with diagrams etc.) with the added benefit of potentially being able to fix error retrospectively (Note: Similar to presentations you don't want to obsess about spelling, grammar, style and bullet points often are the way to go. Avoid "story writing" at all cost, you are presenting information not telling a story. - technical discussions: if done in meeting for anything non trivial leads often to sub-par results, interestingly that is in my experience also true for fast messaging style text communication (like e.g. slack motivates you to do). Thinking more before writing and also having all you questions/comments written down before sending any of them does in my experience works the best. - teaching people: here meeting like things can be good if individualized to the learner and supplementary only. But often you wouldn't call it a meeting anymore. Transcripts can be quite nice in this case but as it should only be supplementary should be unnecessary. - synchronizing work: Inefficient if mostly done through meetings, through sometimes having supplementary meetings for it can be useful. - planing work: Often highly inefficient if mainly done through meetings, through finalizing a plan through a short meeting is a good idea. - brain storming: Can be started by a meeting, should not be concluded by a meeting as mind tend to pop up ideas at the strangest times and should not diverge into technical discussions about the proposals. combine that with how interruptive meetings can be having too frequent meetings seems like a sure fire way to reduce productivity
- Ferret7446 3y agoBecause it's effectively free. Why wouldn't you use something that makes bad meetings slightly better even if it doesn't help good meetings (hypothetically)? You will have bad meetings. Guaranteed or your money back. I see this is an ad that promises "perfect meetings every single time". If you believe that, I got a bridge to sell you. Maybe this product does make it easier to prepare good meetings. You will still have bad meetings, and you will still benefit from automated transcripts. Again, there's basically no reason NOT to have automated transcripts.