How to Use ChatGPT for Meeting Notes

Managing multiple meetings can be daunting for remote professionals, especially when handling administrative tasks like taking notes, tracking decisions, and sharing minutes. The manual process can be time-consuming, stressful, and prone to errors, leading to miscommunication and potential setbacks.

But what if there was a way to automate this process and make it more efficient? In this blog post, we explore the use of AI, specifically the powerful (and most popular) language model ChatGPT, to streamline meeting notes and an even better alternative - Tactiq. 

Here's a quick look at what we'll be covering:

• Can ChatGPT Summarize Meeting Transcripts?
• Pros and Cons of Using ChatGPT for Meetings
• Tactiq: The Best ChatGPT Alternative for Meeting Notes

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What is ChatGPT?

You might already be familiar with ChatGPT. Who hasn’t heard of it, right?

But just in case you missed it, here’s the lowdown:

ChatGPT is a revolutionary AI language model developed by OpenAI. You may have used it to draft emails, create content, or answer questions. But have you ever considered how this powerhouse could help you with meeting notes?

ChatGPT uses machine learning to understand, generate, and respond to human-like text, making it a versatile tool in many contexts, including your professional life. Imagine having an AI meeting assistant that never sleeps and can provide accurate, concise summaries of your meetings. The possibilities are endless!

Here are the most common ways to use ChatGPT for meetings:

• Preparation: It can help draft meeting agendas based on your goal, ensuring you stay organized and on-point during the meeting. Using a well-structured meeting agenda template can guide these AI-driven drafts.
• Brainstorming: It can generate ideas and provide insights during brainstorming sessions.
• Minute Writing: It can help write detailed meeting minutes right after the session.
• Follow-up Emails: It can craft follow-up emails and messages based on key decisions and actions from the meeting.
• Transcription: It can turn your spoken words into written text, which is ideal for remote professionals who prefer to discuss ideas verbally. 
• Summary: Most importantly, it can summarize lengthy meeting transcripts, providing a condensed and understandable version of the discussions.

With ChatGPT, staying on top of meetings has never been easier. Let's delve deeper into that last point – summarizing meeting transcripts.

Can ChatGPT Summarize Meeting Transcripts?

Absolutely! ChatGPT can summarize meeting transcripts, a feature that can be incredibly helpful for super-long meetings. If you've ever found yourself with pages of transcripts, this is where ChatGPT truly shines.

To use ChatGPT for meeting summaries, simply provide it with the full transcript and use specific prompts to request a summary. The AI then processes the content, identifies the key points, and delivers a summary.

Here are a few prompts:

• "Can you summarize the key decisions from this transcript?"
• "What were the main discussion points in this meeting?"
• "Give me a brief overview of the action items discussed."
• "Who were assigned tasks in this meeting, and what are those tasks?"
• "Highlight the main challenges or issues discussed in this meeting."

Providing concise summaries from large amounts of text allows you to focus more on actionable items and less on documentation. Read our blog post, ChatGPT Prompts Template for Meeting: The Ultimate Guide, to learn more about how to use meeting prompts. 

As a content manager, I use meeting transcripts to generate content ideas. For example, when I’m doing a workshop on AI, I would identify key insights I shared and then turn them into LinkedIn posts.

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Can ChatGPT Summarize Meeting Notes?

Yes! ChatGPT can succinctly summarize meeting notes, focusing on the main points, decisions, and action items. Tactiq enhances this process by offering a built-in summary feature, streamlining the workflow significantly. By using Tactiq, you can automatically generate summaries that are directly fed into ChatGPT for further refinement or specific queries, ensuring a seamless and efficient summarization process.

Here’s how you can get a quick AI summary and highlights from your transcripts with Tactiq:

1. Install Tactiq on Chrome. It’s free!
2. Go to the Transcripts page.
3. Click ‘Upload Transcript or Recording’ in the upper right corner.

4. Drag and drop the file into the box or click ‘Choose file.’ After the file is selected, click ‘Upload’.

5. Select the transcript from the list of transcripts.
6. Using Tactiq’s AI feature, click ‘Short summary’ under AI Meeting tools to quickly generate a summary. You can also ask AI to write bullet point highlights, create action items, and more.

7. You can also view the full transcript, its highlights and add notes. Try Tactiq for free now.

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Can ChatGPT Transcribe Live Meetings?

ChatGPT itself cannot transcribe live meetings directly. However, it can be used for real-time transcription and summarization when integrated with third-party tools like Tactiq. Tactiq connects with video conferencing tools to provide live transcriptions for anyone who wishes to use ChatGPT for meeting notes.

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Pros and Cons Of Using ChatGPT for Meetings 

ChatGPT brings a host of benefits to your professional workflow, especially when it comes to handling meeting notes. Yet, like any tool, it isn't without its limitations. Balancing the pros and cons can help you maximize its potential and understand where human input is still vital.

Pros

• Efficiency: ChatGPT automates the process of note-taking and summarizing, saving you considerable time.
• Accuracy: It delivers precise and consistent summaries, minimizing the risk of human error or oversight.
• Availability: As an AI, ChatGPT is available round the clock to assist you, making it ideal for professionals working across different time zones.
• Versatility: Beyond summarizing, it can also help draft meeting agendas, write follow-up emails, and transcribe verbal discussions.

Cons

• Requires Prompts: While powerful, ChatGPT isn't completely autonomous. It needs prompts to provide summaries, which means you have to specify what you want.
• Limitations on Text Length: There's a limit to the transcript length that can be input for summarization, which can be challenging with particularly long meetings.
• Contextual Understanding: Although impressive, AI understanding is still not on par with human comprehension, especially when it comes to nuanced conversations.
• Language Limitations: Currently, ChatGPT primarily works in English, which could be a limitation for multilingual meetings.

I run content teams in the Philippines, and we speak Tagalog. ChatGPT can translate text from Tagalog to English (and vice versa). But most transcription tools can’t transcribe Tagalog voice to text. So, we don’t have a transcript in Tagalog. This may be the case for your language.
But if you write and speak in English, there’s really nothing to worry about! 

Despite these limitations, ChatGPT still provides an efficient way to manage meeting notes. But what if we could take it a step further? What if there was a way to have an AI that could seamlessly integrate with your meetings, take notes, and provide summaries without manually copy-pasting the transcript? 

How Do You Automate Meeting Notes?

While the power of ChatGPT significantly makes it easy to summarize notes, the fact remains that it isn't entirely autonomous. For a seamless experience, various solutions can help automate meeting notes.

Use Built-In Note-taking in Microsoft Teams or Zoom

These platforms offer built-in note-taking features, which can be a good starting point for automating your meeting notes. The limitation here is that you're restricted to the platform. This solution might lack the necessary flexibility if you're coordinating with multiple teams or contractors who prefer different conferencing tools, such as Google Meet.

Can ChatGPT transcribe live meetings?

ChatGPT requires a third-party tool like Tactiq for direct integration with video conferencing tools for real-time transcription and summarization.

Leverage Notion's AI Feature

Notion has an AI feature that can help summarize your meeting transcripts. More and more project management tools are integrating ChatGPT tools into their workflows, so this can be an alternative solution for you. 

However, this process still requires you to download the transcript, upload it to Notion, and provide prompts for summary. This can be cumbersome and time-consuming. 

Integrate an AI Tool with ChatGPT Built-in

Automating meeting notes streamlines the note-taking process and ensures that important information is captured accurately and efficiently. By using ChatGPT with Tactiq, you can simplify how meeting insights are collected, analyzed, and used. This integration allows for a transition from transcription to actionable insights. Here's how ChatGPT relates to the process of automating meeting notes:

• Real-time Transcript: By integrating Tactiq with your meeting platforms, you can obtain real-time transcripts of your meetings. This transcript serves as the foundation for further analysis by ChatGPT, allowing it to process the information accurately.
• AI Summary: With the transcript ready, ChatGPT can then generate summaries of the meetings. Tactiq's built-in summary feature complements this by providing an initial layer of summarization, which ChatGPT can refine based on specific prompts or queries for deeper insights.
• Agenda Generator: Meeting agendas can also be prepared automatically using ChatGPT to draft agendas based on the topics of interest or previous meeting summaries. This automatic agenda ensures that meetings are focused and productive, with ChatGPT helping to keep the discussion aligned with predetermined objectives.

ChatGPT's ability to process and analyze text enables it to extract key points, decisions, and action items from the meeting transcript, offering a comprehensive solution for automating meeting notes.

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How to Use ChatGPT to Write Meeting Notes

The right approach makes crafting detailed and actionable meeting notes easier than ever. Here's a step-by-step guide to using ChatGPT for this purpose:

Step 1: Obtain the Transcript

If you don't already have a meeting transcript, use Tactiq to generate one. Simply upload your recording to Tactiq, which will provide you with a detailed transcript.

Step 2: Prepare Your Prompts

Decide what you want to extract from your meeting notes. Sample prompts could include:

• Summarize the key points discussed.
• List the decisions made during the meeting.
• Identify action items and assignees.
• Provide a brief overview of the discussion on [specific topic].

Step 3: Paste Your Meeting Notes on a Google Doc

With your transcript and prompts ready, copy the meeting notes into a Google Doc. Then, you can input your prompts to ChatGPT to structure and analyze the content as needed.

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Tactiq: The Best ChatGPT Alternative for Meeting Notes

If you're looking for a comprehensive solution to automate your meeting notes, Tactiq is the perfect fit. As an advanced AI tool, Tactiq has integrated ChatGPT into its functionality, taking the best of both worlds to offer you an autonomous note-taking experience.

Here are the pros of using an ai meeting note like Tactiq: 

• Platform Independence: You can use Tactiq with any video conferencing tool, ensuring flexibility and convenience, no matter who you're meeting with.
• No Need for Prompts: Tactiq's built-in AI capabilities mean you don't have to worry about thinking up the right prompts for summarization.
• Custom Prompts with AI Meeting Kits: If you want to create custom prompts, Tactiq allows you to do so with its AI Meeting Kits feature.

AI Meeting Kits offer a unique way to streamline your note-taking process further. These kits allow you to create and save customized prompts based on your typical meeting patterns. 

For example, if you regularly conduct project update meetings, you can create an AI Meeting Kit that automatically prompts for "key project updates," "risks identified," and "next steps." This way, you can reuse the same kit for all similar meetings, ensuring consistency and ease.

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How to Start Using Tactiq to Transcribe and Take Notes on Your Next Meeting 

1. Install Tactiq on your Google Chrome browser. 
2. Connect your preferred video conferencing tool. 
3. Once you join your next call, you’ll see the Tactiq window on the right side of the screen. 

This is where you’ll see the real-time transcript. There will be auto-highlights, but you can also manually highlight sentences and take notes. They’ll all be recorded and part of your transcript after the call.

As a project manager, Tactiq is my absolute favorite tool. Plus, I have anxiety. Having Tactiq has helped me better manage my anxiety because I know I have a record of everything. 

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FAQs

Can ChatGPT integrate with my current meeting platforms for real-time note-taking?

While there's no built-in integration, Tactiq is a bridge enabling ChatGPT to work with transcripts from your meetings on various platforms (Zoom, Google Meet, MS Teams, etc.). This facilitates real-time note-taking indirectly.

Is ChatGPT capable of identifying different speakers in a meeting?

ChatGPT can process transcripts that already label different speakers, but identifying speakers in real-time requires integration with transcription services like Tactiq that support speaker identification.

Can ChatGPT summarize long meetings without losing critical information?

Yes! ChatGPT can effectively summarize lengthy meetings, emphasizing key points, decisions, and action items, but the clarity depends on the quality of the input transcript.

Can ChatGPT generate action items from meeting discussions?

Absolutely! ChatGPT can detect and list action items discussed during the meeting by analyzing the transcript. Using Tactiq's AI Note-Taker can streamline this process for immediate outcomes.

Can ChatGPT use past meeting data for better summaries?

ChatGPT can’t access past meeting data automatically, but you can copy and paste data from a past meeting in ChatGPT, and it will use it in that context.

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The Future is Bright for AI-Powered Meeting Notes

ChatGPT and Tactiq have revolutionized how we approach meeting notes. From transcribing to summarizing, AI-powered note-taking saves time and ensures accuracy. But it's not without its challenges. 

That’s why the ability of Tactiq to integrate ChatGPT's strengths and add extra features like custom prompts shows the transformative potential of AI in our professional lives. Despite current limitations, we can look forward to a future where AI tools make meetings more streamlined and efficient. The journey of AI in meetings is just starting, and the road ahead is promising.