I'm Begging You to Leave Your AI Note-Taker at Home
joanwestenberg.com
joanwestenberg.com
And it’s AI so you literally can’t 100% trust it which is like half the reason I take notes by hand (to keep an honest record).
If it gets things wrong, oh well. Not much of value was lost.
This describes the vast majority of meetings held in the corporate world.
That's astonishing for me, first time I hear about such a practice
Dump them in Obsidian with an LLM agent bolted on. This note may never be consciously re-read, but it will become silent part of the context for conversations with the agent in the future. It is _ridiculous_ how useful this approach is.
That pertains to work meetings, though. I would never bring a recorder to a coffee shop.
1) A stakeholder voiced a wish 1 year ago that I forgot about because it was far fetched and not my area. It went to die in a transcript. Today the AI found and resurfaced it in a context where it was actionable and I was in a position to implement it. I did not ask AI to dig it out specifically, like I said, I did not even remember about it, but it just brought it up. Stakeholder ecstatic.
2) I was able to recreate a huge piece of enterprise architecture without access to docs - from 20 meeting transcripts of people just blathering about other topics. From bits and pieces - word here, sentence there - the AI pieced together the big picture for me. Unfeasible manually, especially because the LLM used its training data to infer things that I wouldn't be able to infer myself.
3) I was added to a project as a consulting/observing party, did not pay MUCH attention, but recorded meetings just in case. Suddenly, plans change, and I end up in charge of the project architecture. Nobody bothered to keep any serious records. I throw transcripts, along with emails and chats, into a context window, and I get an excellent self-onboarding doc. I am ready to talk to clients competently next morning.
4) a vendor is failing us, meeting after meeting they defer, delay, gaslight, pretend to forget or misunderstand or not to have heard what they'd been told. I need to escalate, boss asks "give me details to work with". I throw in the transcripts, and in 1 minute I get the timeline of what was going on, with references. Re-tracing this manually would be hopeless.
5) I can talk to a person and ask their opinion virtually, by loading a corpus of meeting transcripts into AI and asking to pretend it's that person. Having 100k tokens of transcripts allows for a pretty high fidelity replica of that colleague!
For work, this is strictly better than not recording the meeting, as it allows for much faster searching, and it is very rarely wrong about the high level topics of a convo. I almost always go "General AI summary search" -> Transcript -> recording when trying to remember a specific item from a call.
That being said the parent article is spot on and I can't imagine someone bringing a recording to a conversation they aren't being paid to have.
What makes an in-person work meeting any different?
We've had this technology (minus the auto summary) for years. People don't like being interrogated. It's crazy. Or maybe I'm crazy and someone needs to explain how all of this happened, it can't be all tiktok..
Aside from that I just think its rude. Ask permission not forgiveness. People talking to people is what a meeting is all about. If you need assistance there's a conversation to be had about why and on what terms.
I'm frankly far more upset by the lack of privacy due to poor security from credit reporting agencies than I am of these notetakers.