So a few months ago, I had the opportunity to go to an IT conference. It was a full day of talks on a variety of different subjects. Typically, when I go to these kinds of things, I bring my trusty reMarkable and take notes where I need to.

Here’s the problem: there are times when I’m so busy writing down what’s being said that I miss a detail I know is important. And if it’s not in my notes, I’m probably not going to remember it later. So at this conference, I tried something different. I got Notion AI to transcribe what was said through the various talks, and then I used it to generate a few different kinds of summaries:

Meeting summaries

I have meetings all the time. I’ll admit there are times when I’m in a meeting and something I believe is important slips through the cracks. It drives me nuts when I miss information, so having a transcription was huge—because I know I can go back and read whatever I didn’t catch. Even better, I now get meeting summaries for each one that I’m a part of. That means no matter what notes I take, I still have a way to see what was said in the meeting. Not typically who said it, but generally what was said.

I’ve also set it up so I can get specific summaries depending on the meeting:

• If it’s a one-on-one meeting, I get a summary and a to-do list of tasks that were discussed.
• If it’s a talk I’m attending at a conference, I can get things like “main points discussed” and “key takeaways” (which is always good for those kinds of talks).

Daily summaries

If I’m at a big conference with lots of talks on lots of different subjects, I can also get AI to put together a summary of the day and the main points discussed. I like this for conferences where there’s an overarching theme.

You can set it up however you like, but I like to get:

• The main themes discussed
• Three to five main topics
• Two key takeaways (I like my takeaways)

It also lets you look back over the day and make a real summation of what you experienced.

Full conference summaries

For those of us who attend multi-day conferences, the same thing can be done at the end of the conference. I do like that I can have AI go through all my notes taken during the conference (assuming it’s multi-day) and summarize everything for me. What I’ve found (I’ll admit) is that the daily summaries have much better accuracy for covering what was observed on that specific day. But that’s not terribly surprising—it’s hard to summarize two to three days’ worth of information in the same format as a single day. I feel like this one was on me. I’ll reconfigure for the next conference and hope for better results next time. No matter what your stance is on AI (and I’ve heard the whole gamut), it’s important to remember that AI is simply a tool to enhance your life. For the moment, it’s giving us the opportunity to do a bit more with ourselves while it does the grunt work. That is how technology is supposed to work.

I’ll admit, I’ve been getting more and more into AI, and the more things that I try with it, the more I find uses for it. I know I put up a post about the benefits of AI and how I actually got AI to write the thing for me (I PROMISE this is actually me writing btw), but I truly do feel that there are enough things in our lives that require our attention—and if there are some things that can be taken off our mental load, then let’s make that happen. While I am always (and very likely will always be) the guy taking copious amounts of notes in meetings, I like the fact that I now have a tool that can give me a comprehensive breakdown so I can rest easy knowing I won’t miss any vital information if I’m in a meeting.

What do you think about getting AI to take your notes for you?

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