AI tool to record and minute meetings

[DavR]

Has anyone out there had positive experience of using an AI tool to record and produce minutes of meetings?

 

Our Business Manager recently had a video call with someone who used Fathom AI to create some quite passable minutes of their online meeting, complete with action points etc. Having seen that, we're wondering if there's something that can listen in on any meeting we have, and created a sensible set of minutes afterwards. That's in person, as well as online, meetings.

 

We're looking for something more than just a speech to text tool, we want the transcript tidied up, summarised, minuted, etc. After a bit of Googling, Supernormal looks like it could do the job, and, has a free tier. Has anyone tried it?

 

And yes, before we use any of these tool loose on real meeting data we will need to look seriously into how secure/reliable/etc the tool is. Some of the meetings we want minuted would be the highest level of confidential data.

 

Thanks in advance!

[FN-GM]

I think Teams can do this.

[junz]

Has anyone out there had positive experience of using an AI tool to record and produce minutes of meetings?

 

Our Business Manager recently had a video call with someone who used Fathom AI to create some quite passable minutes of their online meeting, complete with action points etc. Having seen that, we're wondering if there's something that can listen in on any meeting we have, and created a sensible set of minutes afterwards. That's in person, as well as online, meetings.

 

We're looking for something more than just a speech to text tool, we want the transcript tidied up, summarised, minuted, etc. After a bit of Googling, Supernormal looks like it could do the job, and, has a free tier. Has anyone tried it?

 

And yes, before we use any of these tool loose on real meeting data we will need to look seriously into how secure/reliable/etc the tool is. Some of the meetings we want minuted would be the highest level of confidential data.

 

Thanks in advance!

 

https://www.read.ai/

[Chuckster]

Teams can record and transcribe a meeting, and summarise it.

 

https://support.microsoft.com/en-gb/office/meeting-recap-in-microsoft-teams-c2e3a0fe-504f-4b2c-bf85-504938f110ef#:~:text=recorded%20and%20transcribed.-,Recaps%20and%20transcripts,transcript%20generated%20during%20the%20meeting.

[DavR]

Thanks for the tip re Teams guys, although really, I was looking for something outside of videoconferencing, as the majority of the meetings we'd want to minute are in person.

 

I suppose in theory you could just have a laptop in the room running a Teams meeting, just for the sake of the minutes, but ideally I think we were looking for a standalone product.

 

It's an option though. Has anyone used this feature in Teams?

[DavR]

https://www.read.ai/

Thanks for the suggestion!

 

Have you used this tool yourself? Any feedback on how accurate it is?

[FN-GM]

Thanks for the tip re Teams guys, although really, I was looking for something outside of videoconferencing, as the majority of the meetings we'd want to minute are in person.

 

I suppose in theory you could just have a laptop in the room running a Teams meeting, just for the sake of the minutes, but ideally I think we were looking for a standalone product.

 

It's an option though. Has anyone used this feature in Teams?

 

I am not an expert but I think you can do it outside of a conference call. You just have the room or 1 person in the meeting.

[rogerdnixon]

Google Meet also does this. Very accurate. You get a Google Doc at the end of the meeting. An Gemini Enterprise licence gets you more bells and whistles.

[dmj]

You can get this in Google Meet if you turn on workspace labs

 

https://support.google.com/docs/answer/13447104

https://support.google.com/meet/answer/14754931

[psydii]

This is built into Microsoft Word these days! https://support.microsoft.com/en-us/office/transcribe-your-recordings-7fc2efec-245e-45f0-b053-2a97531ecf57

 

Probably pretty basic compared to bolt-on products, and it seems to struggle a bit with technobabble (or what ever the teacher-lingo-tla word-salad is called) but it gets you quite a long way there.

[RLR]

You can get this in Google Meet if you turn on workspace labs

 

https://support.google.com/docs/answer/13447104

https://support.google.com/meet/answer/14754931

 

Requires an invite. Still waiting for ours! Anyone know if there's a way to request it?

[Dos_Box]

I do have to ask if there are any GDPR ramifications by using a third party system where certain topics may be of a sensitive nature. It should be OK with Microsoft and Google if you are using them as part of your school's current setup in regard to this, but would you have to be wary of how they are handling\processing the information? Edited May 9, 2024 by Dos_Box

[TechMonkey]

I'd agree with Dos_box. Lots of organisations are actively telling their employees to be careful of meeting with AI bots in for transcribing due to NDAs, GDPR and other sensitivity issues. So be very careful.

 

Teams recording does this, though I haven't ever read fully the transcription so have no idea how good it is. At a cursory glance it seems great.

[DavR]

I am not an expert but I think you can do it outside of a conference call. You just have the room or 1 person in the meeting.

Yeah. If you were going to use it in this way, you'd just open Teams, go to Meet Now, and start a meeting with no-one else in it, and record.

 

Teams does have the benefit that we've already done the DPIA on it, and we can be (relatively) sure we can trust Microsoft with the data.

 

The cons are, we'd rather use something designed for the job, rather than a feature tacked onto an existing product. Still, I guess I'll put it forward as one of the options, so how well it tests out.

[DavR]

This is built into Microsoft Word these days! https://support.microsoft.com/en-us/office/transcribe-your-recordings-7fc2efec-245e-45f0-b053-2a97531ecf57

 

Probably pretty basic compared to bolt-on products, and it seems to struggle a bit with technobabble (or what ever the teacher-lingo-tla word-salad is called) but it gets you quite a long way there.

 

We've used this in Office 365 before, it's not bad. But, we are looking for summarising and turning the transcript into minutes, not just regular speech to text.

[DavR]

I do have to ask if there are any GDPR remifications by using a third party system where certain topics may be of a sensitive nature.

 

For sure, that is a consideration, especially given that so many of the AI providers are startups with unproven records / uncertain security.

 

Anything we do use would have to be fully vetted by the DPO before we gave it anything more than test data.

[ITGuyNW]

I've just turned down a request here for use of an online AI website to help transcribe medical information. Company based in east Asia.

[psydii]

Transcribe in 365 is a "Connected Experience" https://learn.microsoft.com/en-gb/deployoffice/privacy/connected-experiences

 

Data Privacy of Connected Experiences is explained here: https://learn.microsoft.com/en-gb/deployoffice/privacy/connected-experiences-content

 

Very few connected experiences retain customer data for longer than the time it is used to produce the response back to the client. Transcription is not one of those listed in this section.

 

Connected Experiences store data as per the Data Residency settings https://learn.microsoft.com/en-us/microsoft-365/enterprise/o365-data-locations?view=o365-worldwide

 

So for UK schools this should be all on UK servers, but if you didn't click the migration button a few years ago, then it will (should be) in EU with some in the UK 'geography'.

[andy_b]

Has anyone tried to do a hybrid meeting and get Teams AI to produce a summary. We had a quick go and it seemed to get confused easily - but perhaps our meetings are a little too free flowing? Seemed to work better when everyone was on teams.

 

(Without dropping big bucks on fancy hardware https://techcommunity.microsoft.com/t5/microsoft-teams-blog/get-more-out-of-hybrid-meetings-with-teams-rooms-and-copilot/ba-p/4057302 )

Edited May 10, 2024 by andy_b

[DavR]

Has anyone tried to do a hybrid meeting and get Teams AI to produce a summary. We had a quick go and it seemed to get confused easily - but perhaps our meetings are a little too free flowing? Seemed to work better when everyone was on teams.

 

(Without dropping bug bucks on fancy hardware https://techcommunity.microsoft.com/t5/microsoft-teams-blog/get-more-out-of-hybrid-meetings-with-teams-rooms-and-copilot/ba-p/4057302 )

 

This is my concern, to be honest. With a straight Teams meeting, every identity on the meeting has a name (their Teams ID) and is tied to an individual mic. When you've got a group of people all sharing the same Teams ID and the same mic, I do wonder how well it's going to distinguish between people on the transcript / minutes.

[jmak]

This is my concern, to be honest. With a straight Teams meeting, every identity on the meeting has a name (their Teams ID) and is tied to an individual mic. When you've got a group of people all sharing the same Teams ID and the same mic, I do wonder how well it's going to distinguish between people on the transcript / minutes.

It doesn't. It just records all of the words as spoken by the identify signed in. I find it makes writing up minutes quicker and I can identify the speaker by matching with the video, but I haven't seen anything built in that does it.

 

It also seems to struggle with Yorkshire accents... We get worse accuracy with Yorkshire than with English as a second language speakers.

[DavR]

It doesn't. It just records all of the words as spoken by the identify signed in. I find it makes writing up minutes quicker and I can identify the speaker by matching with the video, but I haven't seen anything built in that does it.

 

It also seems to struggle with Yorkshire accents... We get worse accuracy with Yorkshire than with English as a second language speakers.

 

Ha! AI can do many things, but it'll be a while yet before it masters English dialects.....

 

 

Shame about the identity thing, that would be a key feature for us. That being the case we might trial a third party service first, see if it's any better.