Meeting notes that really do write themselves

What you need

A phone or a laptop to record and one transcription tool. For online meetings, Meet, Teams and Zoom mostly do it themselves. For meetings in person, the voice recorder on your phone plus AI transcription is enough. Accuracy is good these days, though you should still check names and company names after the AI.

Three steps

• 1. Record. Phone in the middle of the table, microphone facing the room. Audio quality decides everything else.
• 2. Transcribe. Drop the recording into a transcription tool and you get text.
• 3. Have the minutes written. Paste the transcript into an AI with the prompt below.

The prompt I use

Here is a transcript of a meeting. Turn it into minutes for people who were not there. Structure: 1) a three-sentence summary, 2) the decisions that were made, 3) tasks in the format who / what / by when, 4) open questions with no conclusion. Be concise. Do not invent anything - if it is not in the transcript, mark it as unclear.

That last sentence matters. Without it, AI will happily invent a deadline nobody mentioned. More on building prompts in the prompting course.

Do not let the tasks slip

Minutes on their own solve nothing. Have the output formatted the way you will actually use it: bullets for an email, rows for a spreadsheet, or a short message into the group chat. If the team has one place for tasks, get them there immediately, not two days later.

What to watch out for

• Always tell people you are recording. One sentence at the start does it: "I am recording this for the minutes, is that okay?" Do not do it without consent.
• For sensitive subjects (salaries, health, named customers) consider whether you need a recording at all. See the lesson Where not to put sensitive data.
• Delete the recordings once the minutes exist. There is no point storing hours of audio.

Minutes that appear within an hour of the meeting get read. Minutes that appear a week later do not.