By Elliott Brack
Editor and Publisher, GwinnettForum
APRIL 11, 2025 | Watch out! Today here’s another story that is hard to believe, but yet another advancement that others are finding useful. It came our way because no one on a committee wanted to keep the minutes. This technology can blow the mind.
The new buzz word is “artificial intelligence” (AI), something that up to now, I find hard to get my brain around. But this week I got a new insight in the way AI might help us.
It came from a zoom meeting of our church’s finance committee. One member heard that we might use AI to produce minutes of the meeting. Eight of us were on that Zoom call, with the recording of the session via Otter.ai, Inc. The company is based in Mountain View, Calif.
Immediately after the one-hour meeting was over, we had a written verbatim transcript of that session. As each of us talked, it listed our name and what we said, by paragraphs. What we got back was most complete in its detailed wording of what each of us said. The transcripts can come back to you in English, French or Spanish.
For a 30-minute session, the work is free. If you want to record more time, there are several pricing plans. The cost is $8.33 per month (billed annually) for a 90-minute conversation. Another plan for $20 per month allows four hours of transcribed conversation.
Unknown to me, Otter has been around for a while. Tracey Rice of Peachtree Corners used Otter when with a major company, and had this to say:
“I used Otter for a whole year in 2022 when I was the project manager with a nonprofit. The transcript was definitely useful, especially when we wanted to capture verbatim comments. But you have to sift through a lot of’ ‘um’s’ and ‘ya know’s’ to get to the real content.”
Then she added: “The verbatim transcript is difficult to use because of all the gibberish in there, but the summary seemed quite useful (and pretty darn amazing, if you ask me!) It has definitely come a long way since I used it. If I were responsible for the minutes, I would find it helpful.”
There are at least two similar services:
Fireflies is an AI tool that helps with meetings by transcribing, summarizing, and analyzing conversations. It has strong collaboration features to make teams more productive. It is best for team collaboration, analyzing conversations, and automating workflows. Fireflies.ai is headquartered in Pleasanton, Calif.
MeetGeek is a similar service. It automatically detects the language, meeting and context so your notes are always tailored with zero manual set-up. MeetGeek, founded in 2020, is based in Bucharest, Romania.
Unfortunately, in most meetings, there is a lot of trash amidst the valuable parts. This AI transcription was most complete. It would be most helpful, perhaps, in recording the exact wording for a court of law, or perhaps for the United Nations. However, in most meetings, an informed person might find it easier to reconstruct the minutes from jotting down careful notes, and leaving all the set-asides and gibberish alone. And there was plenty of that in our, and most, meetings.
It was amazing, but ineffective, in that a person would have to review and severely edit the transcript to build reasonable minutes of the meeting.
Evaluation: This usage is accurate, but not worthy for most meetings.
We still cannot imagine what gee-whiz ideas might be around the next corner. No doubt our minds will be amazed again!
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