All your conversation are belong to us
You know how, at an important meeting, everyone immediately opens their laptop and starts taking notes? The same notes, of the same conversation, that they are supposed to be participating in?
The good news is that group note-taking in meetings is on the way out. For a while now we have had tools such as Otter, Trint and others that turn an audio recording into a timestamped transcript.
More recently, they have moved to transcribe audio in real time, which in itself was a big advancement. With Otter, this meant that you could highlight text immediately after someone had spoken for you to review later. If you are using the mobile app, you can take a photo of a presentation and Otter will insert that photo into the transcript at the time it was taken. Very useful.
But the latest AI tools go even further. You can paste a transcript into ChatGPT and ask for a summary of the conversation. You can even ask questions about what happened in the transcript and ChatGPT will give you the answers.
The only downside (well, apart from the hassle of copy paste) is that ChatGPT has a limit on the length of the transcript.
For larger businesses, there’s also the concern about privacy. Yes, you can toggle a button that ChatGPT says will stop it sharing your data with its training model. I don't know how many big brands would trust OpenAI without a signed agreement, though.
A new tool called Fireflies overcomes these issues. It records and transcribes the whole conversation (with timestamps) – no constraints on length.
It then produces a short summary of the conversation which is fantastic for anyone who missed it, or if you need a quick refresher. And it even gives you a list of action items for people mentioned during the meeting. Impressive!
I haven’t looked at the terms and conditions for Fireflies yet but I would expect that it provides confidentiality agreements that ChatGPT lacks.
The crazy thing is that, even as Fireflies breaks ground, Microsoft is already coming after it. Teams is getting a feature called Intelligent Recap that does everything Fireflies does. Only available on Teams’ premium plan, though.
Check out this video of Teams Intelligent Recap in action.
One interesting behavioural change – we will soon become accustomed to every business meeting to be on the record.
Previously it would have been a little awkward to record a conversation; everyone would be much more careful about what they would say as they don’t want to have it held against them. (As a journalist I have seen this many times.)
Now every conversation will be recorded, summarised and shared. People will likely trust Microsoft to secure those audio conversations just as they already trust it to secure all their email conversations.
Ultimately, humans prefer convenience over privacy. (Ref: social media.) A common desire to get rid of notetaking will incidentally lead to greater accountability – we know exactly what you promised to do, so you better do it!
