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AI Businesses

AI Note Takers Are Increasingly Outnumbering Humans in Workplace Video Calls (msn.com) 20

AI-powered note-taking apps are increasingly attending workplace meetings in place of human participants, creating situations where automated transcription bots outnumber actual attendees.

Major platforms including Zoom, Microsoft Teams and Google Meet now offer built-in note-taking features that record, transcribe and summarize meetings for invited participants who don't attend. The technology operates under varying legal frameworks, with most states requiring only single-party consent for recording while California, Florida, and Pennsylvania mandate all-party approval.

AI Note Takers Are Increasingly Outnumbering Humans in Workplace Video Calls

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  • by DamnOregonian ( 963763 ) on Wednesday July 02, 2025 @03:24PM (#65492034)
    My multi-vendor Zoom and Teams meetings transitioned to AI note takers a while ago- completely.
    I don't know how well it works, but at least in my professional environment, working with several very large networking equipment vendors, municipalities, and construction contractors, the replacement is total.
    • From a transcription standpoint, it works fine, if sometimes a bit off due to pronunciation issues. From an actual useful notetaking exercise, it's pretty bad. I took an hour kickoff meeting transcription and it pumped out about 2 single lined pages of "summary." My handwritten notes, excluding the attendees, filled up 1.5 pages on 8" x 5" notepad. Skimming the AI summary showed a few false positives on action items. In the end, I usually end up typing my handwritten notes up and sending out an email. It wo
      • I know they can't be that useless, or my PM wouldn't use them.
        I haven't directly asked him- but he is quite good at what he does, and is fucking excellent at capturing the guts of a meeting of tech leadership.

        And to be fair audio was fed into an external LLM. Maybe copilot or some of the alternatives do a better job.

        Good question. I sincerely doubt this guy is the kind of person that would feed it into a local LLM we're running, heh. My money is definitely on a paid service.
        I'll ask him if I remember.

  • useless meetings (Score:5, Insightful)

    by awwshit ( 6214476 ) on Wednesday July 02, 2025 @03:27PM (#65492040)

    If all you need to do at a meeting is take notes then you don't need to be in the meeting, it could have been an email.

    • It's there so when people are blowing you off you can inconvenience them until they give you what you want from them.

      Apart from that you have meetings that exist to keep people employed. And yeah all those people are going to lose their jobs soon in a huge wave of productivity enhancements.

      Of course you're not going to see a dime of any of that money in the form of lower prices because companies don't lower prices anymore. Why would they? They have little or no competition.

      Meanwhile hundreds of
  • by dgatwood ( 11270 ) on Wednesday July 02, 2025 @03:27PM (#65492044) Homepage Journal

    Basically, AI note takers allow all the folks who aren't really needed at the meeting to just get the email summary. What this means is that A. none of them should have been asked to go to the meeting in the first place, and B. the meeting probably should have been an email.

    Meetings tend to be useful for the person calling the meeting. The number of meetings that were genuinely useful for me as an attendee... over the course of my entire career, I can count them on one hand, as long as I use binary. 99% of time spent in meetings is not useful. And even in meetings that are genuinely important and useful, half the time is usually not useful.

    More emails, fewer meetings. We had it right during the pandemic. That's why productivity improved so much.

    • by dvice ( 6309704 )

      Regarding your B. When you make decisions in a meeting, it can help years later if you can check why the decisions were made, when there is a need to change those decisions and you don't remember why it was made. It can also save your skin if there is something written down that says that customer made a wrong decisions years ago, so you won't get blamed for it. It can also help when people in the project change.

      There are 2 kinds of meetings:
      1. Workshops, where you try for example to find a solution to a pr

  • Real Genius (Score:5, Funny)

    by acroyear ( 5882 ) <jws-slashdot@javaclientcookbook.net> on Wednesday July 02, 2025 @03:35PM (#65492048) Homepage Journal

    I'm having flashbacks to that sequence in Real Genius (the 1980s movie with Val Kilmer) where over time, tape recorders have replaced not only all the students in a lecture hall (except for Mitch), but also the professor.

  • Well, it was all bullshit anyways, so I guess AI is a good fit.

  • Why would you need more than on AI note-taker? That's all you can do in MS Teams AFAIK

  • This is one thing that I'll absolutely use AI for- it's often very good at summing up meeting notes and all the drek that goes along with it- dropped files, links, references to other projects, etc etc.

    It gives me back at least an hour a day, an hour of the most tedious, mind-numbing work that I would have to do. So yeah, for this use case I'm all in.

  • These AI note takers are produced by all kinds of random companies with no track record, no history. Every note they take, they have on their own internal systems, and can sell it to whoever they want. So if you want to know what your competition is up to, reach out to some of these note-taker AI companies, I have no doubt they would be happy to sell you whatever they have on your competition!

  • AI will cost more and more. And also, more and more folk will be less and less engaged in the world that they're supposed to be a participant in. A recipe for disaster imho.
  • You'll notice the extra action items assigned to you when the notes get published,

Where there's a will, there's a relative.

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