How to use AI to automate the dreaded office meeting
Hello! Welcome back to About technology: AIa pop-up newsletter that teaches you about artificial intelligence, how it works and how to use it.
Last week I told you how to use creative AI tools that generate and edit stunning images. Now let’s move on to automating some time-consuming, sometimes tedious parts of many office tasks.
Yes, I am talking about meetings. I will discuss how tasks such as preparing presentations, writing talking points, and writing minutes can be accelerated using generative AI tools such as ChatGPT.
A sensible warning before we get started: anything you do using an online service can potentially be seen by the company running it, be it a major tech company or an AI startup. So if your meeting deals with sensitive topics such as trade secrets or employee issues, now may not be the best time to experiment with these new tools.
How to generate a slideshow
The website gamma automatically generates a detailed and colorful slide deck with images, charts and text. You will probably need to adjust the text and add some of your own photos. But think of this generator as a presentation template on steroids that automates the boring stuff so you can work on the finer details.
First, sign up for a free account, click “presentation” and type a prompt. As with text and image generators, the more detailed your directions, the better.
Here’s an example I used that describes a hypothetical presentation:
Staff updates for a tech startup. Announcing new hires including a director of diversity, a head of HR and 7 new software engineers. We now employ 120 people and hope to expand to 150 by 2024. In the future, we will hire a head of business development and expand the sales staff.
Gamma responds to prompts with slide summaries and template options in different color schemes.
Based on my prompt, Gamma created a seven-slide presentation. Gamma included panels describing the roles of the new Director of Diversity and Head of HR.
Here’s a snippet of two slides that Gamma created:
The last step is to edit the presentation. In my example, I would add the names of the new hires, their biographies, and their portrait photos.
A word of warning: generative AI systems are vulnerable to a phenomenon called “hallucination,” in which the model makes up plausible-sounding nonsense. Especially in a working environment, it is vital to triple check that no inaccuracies have crept in.
I tested another site, similar to Gamma, which made beautiful slides, but also made up imaginary employees and linked them to photos of real people scraped from the internet. Not good!
Discussion points
To prepare for the hypothetical meeting to discuss employee updates, I would start by saying to a chatbot like ChatGPT, Bard, or Bing, “Pretend you are my executive assistant who will collect talking points for me, the CEO of a tech -startup, for a presentation on…” and then paste the earlier prompt I used to create the slide deck.
(Remember, “pretend…” is one of the golden clues for using generative AI)
The chatbot will then generate a list of talking points to attach to each slide, along with some suggested comments. Again, you may need to make some edits.
Summarize meeting minutes
Let’s say you want to quickly jot down notes that summarize what was discussed during the meeting. Zoom and Google include tools that use AI to automatically transcribe speech from a meeting to a text file, as long as the meeting is recorded with everyone’s consent. You can then paste the transcript into a chatbot and ask them to summarize it. (Remember, don’t do this with sensitive information.)
If you use Google Meet with a business license, meeting transcripts are enabled by default and a link to a Google Doc is emailed to the host. (You can also follow Google steps to activate the transcription function.)
If you use Zoom, you need a business, education, or enterprise license cloud recording enabled in the account settings. Enable cloud recording when the Zoom meeting starts. Once the meeting is over, the service automatically generates the transcript.
From there, go to a chatbot and type the prompt: “Pretend you’re my executive assistant. This transcript will help you take minutes of meetings.” Next, paste the part of the transcript you want to summarize, and the chatbot will automatically format it into a one-minute memo (if the transcript is too long, you can tell the chatbot you’re going to paste it in multiple parts and you says when you’re done.)
If the meeting was not recorded, but someone took notes, they can be pasted into a chatbot along with the same prompt to format the document into a meeting memo.
What’s next?
Next week I’ll discuss how AI can be used for consumption – think vacation planning and shopping.