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Comment by codeulike | Hacker News Reader

A plugin for Microsoft Teams called "Waffle" that watches the transcript of the meeting. If you suddenly realise you have been asked a question, or are supposed to say something, but you havent been paying attention, you press the "Waffle" button and ChatGPT feeds you some anodyne lines to say, based on the last few minutes of the meeting transcript.

Well I think you've all raised some really interesting points, maybe we should circle back and think about the new issues listed in the risk register

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Teams is notoriously bad software, so you can just say "Sorry, my Teams cut out again. Could you repeat that?" And everyone would believe you.

A bit less credible on a fiber link, I think.

Different OSI layers bud. Doesn't matter how reliable the network connection is if the software is still a steaming POS.

This. We use it because its included with Microsoft 365. It’s a hot pile of garbage.

I’m on fibre. Last month I had a lot of video calls on zoom, Google Meet, MS Teams and even WebEx. Google was by far the most reliable and MS Teams was frequently a complete mess with participants unable to converse and merely an observer. And every person who set up a Teams meeting with me began with a preface about the miserable experiences they’ve been having with Teams of late.

I don’t use it myself so can’t really give a good review but my window into the world of long term users would suggest that saying you were cut off wouldn’t strike anyone else as unusual.

The best internet connection in the world can’t help crappy software.

I've never had any issues with Teams other than latency can be too high. I've heard people say that it is a resource hog - maybe but I don't notice it on my basic 8GB laptop (and certainly don't notice it on my workstation).

Thing is, if you've really not been paying attention, having someone repeat the last sentence or question is not sufficient. For example you might end up making a point that had just been discussed, and end up looking clueless. What you really need is to grok the last five or ten minutes of conversation, and ChatGPT is great at that

For some reason, no matter what the meeting, industry, number of people in the meeting or context Well I think you've all raised some really interesting points, maybe we should circle back and think about the new issues listed in the risk register is a suitable response.

Meetings are usually dumb. Perhaps we need AI to help us figure out how to run an effective meeting.

My Ai will circle back and touch base with your Ai to discuss offline allocating some bandwidth so we can push back by the close of play.

I'm mostly being serious with my comment. I think meetings are necessary but somehow we end up wasting a lot of time. The other factor is, once a person's time becomes largely consumed by meetings, they tend to throw in the towel and give up on any deep thought or any kind of accomplishment. Once this watershed moment occurs, the tendency to book more meetings is increased. After all, it is far better to be 100% overhead and only attend meetings all day vs attending meetings 60% of the time an expected to do something meaningful in the remaining 40% (which is usually highly fragmented).

I have seen that play out with managers before, especially those that espouse 'hard work' principles. Once you are over a threshold of meetings actual work is functionally impossible and to avoid being seen to be "not busy" the hard working executive will pull others in their orbit into meetings, dragging others over the threshold ...

If the AI is actually intelligent, what it would say about most meetings is "this meeting should not be held."

I think you are right. The Alpha Zero manager would likely operate very differently.

I just came up with a great title for a management book “The Alpha Zero Manager”. Now I’ll just ask GPT to write the content.

They already did this: https://www.microsoft.com/en-us/microsoft-365/blog/2023/02/0...

Just have to hope OpenAI isn't having a capacity issue when you get asked a question haha but a pretty good idea overall.

[sips water, adjusts glasses, clears throat]

Ahem ... I am a large language model trained by OpenAI and I don't have the ability to ...

lol

I do this already, all without the help of a plug-in. Normally, I just start typing in the chat that I'm having audio trouble so we can take the conversation off-line where the question asker just ends up repeating it anyway.

That's brilliant. Someone would absolutely make bank with that

btw I dont have time to make this, someone please make this

I want this

Great idea!

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