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alihaghani

58 karma · joined February 15, 2016

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alihaghani··on Launch HN: Circleback (YC W24) – Tooling to make meetings more efficient
Thanks! We currently use Recall.ai.
alihaghani··on Launch HN: Circleback (YC W24) – Tooling to make meetings more efficient
In many cases, if you don't have to worry about jotting down notes and action items during a meeting, the meeting can be conducted more efficiently. While not novel, a well-written meeting summary also makes it easier to quickly get an understanding of what was discussed and needs to be done as a result of the meeting, whether you attended it a few hours/days/months ago or didn't attend at all. Being able to automatically act on the outcomes is the really exciting part.

I agree that there's more that can be done for meetings that heavily rely on visuals. Right now, we save what was screen shared (if recordings are enabled) but the visual component isn't used in generating outcomes. Lots of interesting things that can be done with multimodal models here.

alihaghani··on Launch HN: Circleback (YC W24) – Tooling to make meetings more efficient
Thank you!
alihaghani··on Launch HN: Circleback (YC W24) – Tooling to make meetings more efficient
Thank you! Glad to hear the integrations have been valuable.
alihaghani··on Launch HN: Circleback (YC W24) – Tooling to make meetings more efficient
We provide a compelling alternative to those considering building vs. buying in this space but there's nothing more customizable than building your own solution.

Right now, we provide the following customization levers: custom vocabulary (configurable from Settings → Account) and custom prompts (via insights you can define in workflows). We're also working on adding more control over the verbosity of the notes.

If you're looking to have full control over the outcomes generated, I would also suggest building your solution if the building/maintenance costs make sense. We're focused on providing an out-of-the-box solution that works really well with minimal setup (with customizations available for power users) and providing value beyond just summarization with search, workflow automation, and collaboration features (i.e. sharing, commenting) for teams.

If you do decide to try out Circleback, I'd love to get your thoughts as someone who's very well-informed about this space!

alihaghani··on Launch HN: Circleback (YC W24) – Tooling to make meetings more efficient
Thanks! Right now, the delta between Zoom AI summaries and ours is enough to get many to switch.

We've also built (and are continuing to build) functionality that goes beyond summarization:

- Integrations that connect with other apps/CRMs to automatically push relevant data after every meeting.

- We can automatically identify and take action on insights you care about. An example I showed in the linked video (https://youtu.be/13NX0QxG5hI?feature=shared&t=144): I have a workflow to identify the customer's industry after every demo call I do. There are some really cool use cases here, especially when combined with integrations, i.e. automatically updating a field in a CRM with the customer's industry, or create a new row in a Notion database. We'll soon be adding schema support for insights so you can have more control over the structure of the insights generated, too.

- AI-powered search across all your meetings: being able to get an answer to a question using the context of your/your team's meetings (regardless of whether they happened on Zoom, Meet, Slack huddles, or in-person) is quite powerful and something we're working on making much better.

alihaghani··on Launch HN: Circleback (YC W24) – Tooling to make meetings more efficient
Appreciate the feedback.

We've had some customers request more detailed notes which we've enabled for them on the backend. We have plans to release more self-serve customization around verbosity as there's no one-size-fits-all solution.

Agree on linking notes to the transcript. Citing sources (from the transcript/recording) is something we're introducing to more surface areas in the product.

alihaghani··on Launch HN: Circleback (YC W24) – Tooling to make meetings more efficient
We don't use customer data to train models.
alihaghani··on Launch HN: Circleback (YC W24) – Tooling to make meetings more efficient
FWIW, by default we don't store meeting recordings–only the transcript. Saving meeting recordings is something you can enable from Settings → Account.
alihaghani··on Launch HN: Circleback (YC W24) – Tooling to make meetings more efficient
Great idea. I imported a Scottish Parliament meeting (https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=b2WPUzr5ieI), you can see the results here: https://app.circleback.ai/view/ltg9d70asxk05j1fyaq.

Right now, speaker identification (and thus everything downstream that depends on that) works better for meetings where Circleback joins the call (compared to those imported) but I wanted to share this anyway.

alihaghani··on Launch HN: Circleback (YC W24) – Tooling to make meetings more efficient
Thanks! We have some kinks to work out with the intro meeting and its associated action items. Everything associated with the intro meeting is stored client-side hence why action items being marked as complete don't persist. You shouldn't notice any issues like that with real meetings (let me know if you do).
alihaghani··on Launch HN: Circleback (YC W24) – Tooling to make meetings more efficient
The summaries/action items you get with Circleback are better in terms of accuracy and detail than with Zoom AI. Running the two in parallel for a meeting and comparing the outcomes is a great way to test this and how most customers end up switching.
alihaghani··on Launch HN: Circleback (YC W24) – Tooling to make meetings more efficient
No way! It's been so long, would love to catch up.
alihaghani··on Launch HN: Circleback (YC W24) – Tooling to make meetings more efficient
We use a Whisper-based model for transcription which works really well with accents and supports over 100 languages. Would be keen to get your thoughts if you try it out.
alihaghani··on Launch HN: Circleback (YC W24) – Tooling to make meetings more efficient
Definitely, the GitLab meeting linked (https://app.circleback.ai/view/lt93jwzdg3hdzcdnxmm) is one example. Let me know if any other public meetings come to mind I can import to show this.
alihaghani··on Launch HN: Circleback (YC W24) – Tooling to make meetings more efficient
The main reason our customers have shared for switching from Otter to Circleback is better quality notes and action items as well as ease of use. Some of the automations you can create in Circleback are also not possible in Otter. I can't speak to Cogram as I haven't tried out the product or know much about it.
alihaghani··on Ask HN: Who is hiring? (February 2017)
Are you guys hiring interns/co-ops at all?