I Tried an AI Meeting-Minutes Summarizer, and It Works Better Than I Expected
My team has meetings three times a week, so writing up the minutes was the most tedious part. I threw in the recording and said, "Just extract the decisions and action items," and it had everything organized in 10 minutes.
However, it kept getting people's names wrong in similar ways, so I had to manually correct the speaker names. Still, a task that used to take 40 minutes now takes 15, so I'm satisfied.
If anyone here is using meeting-notes automation effectively, I'd love it if you could share how you write your prompts.
10 answers
Oh, I didn't know that
So true lol The catch is that the meeting ends up taking longer than writing the minutes.
Well, that's a bit much. Getting a speaker's name wrong is easy enough to fix, but it's more dangerous when decision summaries lose the context and only the wording gets polished. If you don't review that and just run it as is, later you end up in arguments like, "That's not what we decided back then." Our team added one more step: AI draft + owner review.
The prompt goes roughly like this.
"You are a meeting minutes writer. From the transcript below, organize it into 1) decisions made, 2) action items by owner (including deadlines), and 3) items on hold / for later discussion. Do not guess; for anything not in the transcript, mark it as 'Not mentioned.' Keep speaker names in the [Speaker 1] format."
The last line is the key. If you keep the names as-is, someone can just batch-replace them later, which makes things much easier.
I use it similarly, and the key is to run it right after the meeting ends. Once a day passes, the context gets fuzzy in my memory, which slows down review.
Got a source? It doesn't say what tool you used.
Honestly, cutting 40 minutes down to 15 is impressive on its own, but I think what really gets saved is "the time during meetings when you can't focus because you're busy taking notes." Since I started using this, I don't even turn on my laptop during meetings. Just make sure to get recording consent, though. I once ran it without getting consent and a teammate was really uncomfortable lol
Same here. But for typos in names, I don’t think you should try to catch them with prompts—manual is probably the way to go. It does help a bit if you paste the attendee list in advance.
Isn't that outdated? The newer ones these days even handle speaker diarization on their own. Though it still gets Korean names wrong lol
One tip: at the start of a meeting, just set a rule like 'From now on, when a decision comes up, we'll say "decision" and move on.' Then the accuracy of what it extracts feels like it doubles. It wasn't an AI problem—it was an input signal problem. And personally, you need to limit the summary length, like 'within half an A4 page,' or else it tacks on pointless fluff.