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Comment by holowoodman | Hacker News Reader

Btw, question to the wisdom of HN: Good meetings need minutes.

Is there a minutes taking tool that does automatically list the attendants and their join/leave times, allow me to create items like TODO, DECISION, POLL, DISCUSS_MORE, GET_INFO, BLOCKER that will then be tabulated and cross-referenced automatically across more than one meeting? And added to the TODO-lists of participants referenced?

Preferrably somewhat independently of the conference tool in use, because that varies a lot around here.

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They're coming online with all this AI stuff. Zoom has an integrated one that I've used a few times, and even explicitly directed the AI to add things to the work items which has worked so far, though I haven't tried it very often to know how reliable that is.

But it's still early days... Zoom's is still really just "let's throw a transcription of the meeting at an LLM with a system prompt and let the chips fall where they may" rather than any sort of major integration yet that would let you do anything like get a live link to your bug tracker to propose a bug based on the conversation pre-filled with the LLM's best guess of the summary of your conversation or anything.

Well first off, do you actually need all that? How formal are these meetings?

Ours are pretty informal, we (unfortunately) use MS Teams which has an agenda & notes section; people are asked to fill in the agenda if they have any points (which is frustrating because getting there isn't easy or obvious), people can write down notes and action points during the meeting (it's a shared and collaborative effort).

You can assign tasks to people's todo lists though, but of course the problem is fragmentation; everyone has their own todo lists, there's Jira for work items, etc.

It sounds more formal than it should be. In my mind, it's more about easier searching and retracing steps and decisions. The only really formal thing in there is the list of TODOs and the DECISIONS. The first ones because obviously you need people to do them, and it's easier if they are automatically on a list of theirs and not forgotten. The DECISIONS are important because in retrospect somebody always will want to know the when/how/who/why around them.

But you could be right, this might not be the unifying tool for everything but more like number 29 that has never replace the previous 28...

Google Workspace tools, like Google Meet, can automatically transcribe the meeting, and then you can use AI (Gemini) to summarize and generate searchable minutes.

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