10 Ways AI Assistants Can Help With Your Meetings & Interviews

AI assistants have taken the world by storm. Many of us have difficulty imagining a life without a Siri, Alexa, or Google Assistant to automate some of our tasks. While the AI tech on our phones can do little more than schedule meetings, more specialized AI assistants are specifically designed to assist your team during online meetings. So what kind of tasks can these assistants perform?

You can invite AI assistants to virtual meetings the same way you invite other people. Generally, their applications fall into three categories: recording conversations, indexing data, and managing tasks. The assistant can help you to assign tasks for any decisions you make during a meeting.

Many of the manual administrative tasks we often have to complete during or after a meeting can be automated using an AI meeting assistant. This makes life much easier for business owners and managers. We'll examine these benefits to find out which smart meeting assistants are right for you and your business.

Benefit 1: Attend And Record Meetings

You can invite an AI assistant to attend your online meetings just as you would invite anyone else. Most AI software packages have some form of back-end configuration system or platform that you can link with your Zoom, Teams, or Google Meet calendars.

When the meeting starts, the assistant will join and become one of the attendees in your online session. And it should immediately begin to show its value. Although you may not notice it, it records your entire meeting. Now many people will say, “big deal, I can already record my meetings myself.” These assistants can capture not only video and audio, but also text. Words are converted to text, and this text can be used for meeting minutes, captions, and summaries. Read more about this below.

Benefit 2: Automatically Generate Captions

We’ve all grown used to how services like Facebook and YouTube automatically generate captions for videos (often with hilarious results). Thankfully, AI meeting assistants, for the most part, are better at captioning. It's not always perfect, though, since it can't account for different accents or crackling microphones.

AI auto-captioning offers excellent benefits for your team’s online meetings. We've all had internet connection problems during an online meeting. These interruptions can make it difficult to communicate with other attendees, especially those with hearing disabilities. When the audio breaks away or your headphones aren't as good as they should be, AI-generated captions can help you keep track of the conversation. The captions should make the general train of thought and the core message of the conversation clear to all attendees, despite a few errors here and there (thankfully getting less frequent as the technologies improve).

Benefit 3: Generate AI Meeting Summaries

Summarizing a meeting is a handy shorthand way to keep track of what was discussed. AI assistant software can track who is speaking in real time, so it is capable of creating a meeting summary that can be sent to all attendees after the meeting since the conversation is already being recorded.

These summaries can also include text chats. In every online meeting, there are usually people who can't (or won't) unmute their microphone, instead using text chat to comment or ask questions. Smart meeting assistants can include all of these text messages in the meeting summary.

Benefit 4: Create Meeting Minutes

A logical next step up from summarizing the meeting is creating fully-fledged meeting minutes as the meeting progresses. After all, that's what secretaries and personal assistants, and more recently, virtual assistants have always done, so why shouldn't the AI meeting assistant be able to do the same?

Some AI assistants, like the popular Fireflies.ai have implemented a feature that lets them compile meeting minutes automatically. To make this work, you can simply submit the meeting agenda to the AI software when you schedule the meeting, and the AI will then adjust the captured meeting notes and transcripts to fit the agenda, compiling the meeting minutes in the process.

This is great for sales reps who need to keep meeting records and details of their sales pitch, and also to create summaries of their phone conversations to send to potential clients (and their bosses).

You need to keep in mind that the system isn't perfect yet. The AI will still make mistakes, so don’t accept the automatic AI content as the final product; it’s good to review them before sending them to the attendees. At least run the notes through Grammarly to quickly check for grammar issues. 

Benefit 5: Automatically Send Meeting Notes

You can configure your software to automatically send meeting notes, meeting transcripts, and even minutes to all attendees directly after a meeting. This can be configured to go to all meeting participants in a particular mailing list or even instant messaging platforms and push notification systems.

This eliminates the time-consuming task of manually sending out information following a meeting, while also ensuring that everyone understands what is expected of them and no one can claim that they “didn't get the memo.”

Benefit 6: Index Your Meetings

Since the assistant will capture all audio from your meetings and convert it to text, it will be a straightforward process to store this text in a database. Artificial intelligence algorithms will also intelligently sort the content into headings and sections based on common topics and points of discussion while referencing the people who said everything.

If your meeting happens to be a podcast show or interview, you can also use the technology to help create detailed podcast notes. And if you need a hand with writing additional notes, introductions, or summaries, look no further than these AI writing tools.

Benefit 7: Create Searchable Indexed Contents 

In addition to converting audio to text, AI-based smart meeting assistant technology can scan through the text to understand it. That’s the difference between artificial intelligence tech and regular speech-to-text platforms. As the AI sorts the data and analyzes the content for different topics and key items, it also identifies specific keywords and phrases. These keywords make it easy for users to search for any particular piece of information.

For example, if you remember that someone gave a due date for a task, but you can’t remember when exactly it is due, you can search the database of the meeting in question for the words “due date.” Every mention of due dates in that particular meeting will show up in the search results. From here, it’s a simple process to locate the exact reference you’re looking for.

Benefit 8: Build A Wiki Of All Of Your Meetings

Taking the database and its search functions one step further, your AI meeting assistant can eventually build up and compile a database of all of your meetings. These databases often resemble something like a wiki, with different articles (each meeting being an article) all cross-referenced with one another and easily searchable.

The fact that the topics are cross-referenced across different meetings makes it easy for you to backtrack the entire history of a project, at least across all the sessions in which that project was discussed. You will never have to search through stacks of printed meeting minutes to find the exact piece of information that you are looking for since it’s all so easily accessible.

Benefit 9: Enable Collaboration

A useful feature for client-facing teams is the ability to give your client access to specific meeting archives and databases. In emails or other correspondence, the team and client can easily include links to portions of the discussion.

Consider, for instance, a situation where the team is unsure of some of the client's requirements. An email conversation can then be sent with a link to a particular section of the meeting where that topic was discussed and further clarification requested.

Similarly, the customer can quickly point out sections of the meeting to team members to indicate where some of their requirements are not being met, even if they were agreed upon at some point during the meeting. This is one way of improving team performance through constructive feedback.

This level of collaboration, enabled by the meeting AI, eliminates any gaps in communication and assists with a smoother workflow. It’s much easier and more convenient than working through an hour-long video to find the part that caused the misunderstanding.

Benefit 10: Integration With CRM

This is an advanced feature that’s becoming more and more common in AI-based meeting assistant tech. Some tools can seamlessly integrate with your team’s CRM system. A good example is Fireflies.ai‘s integration with Hubspot CRM, one of the top 5 CRMs in the United States.

Besides helping you schedule and communicate meeting details, this CRM integration also allows you to assign tasks within your CRM system once a decision has been reached.

For example, if you decide that two or three team members will be responsible for completing a particular task by a set due date, the meeting assistant can often identify this decision and allow you to easily assign that task, with the correct due date, to those team members.

The Best AI Meeting Assistants For Your Needs

From simple AI meeting assistants that can help you keep track of your presentation, to more advanced ones that can help you engage with your audience, there are many tools and just as many capabilities. These are the most effective, popular, and proven AI meeting assistants we recommend:

1. MeetGeek.ai lets you take better notes and close deals with clients . You can easily search for keywords and revisit important parts of the conversation – it's great for teaching and training. There's a generous free plan and Pro plans start at $19 per month for 20 hours of recordings.
2. Avoma is one of the original AI meeting assistants with an excellent market reputation. Avoma is an acronym for “A Very Organized Meeting Assistant,” and by user reviews, it’s safe to say that it’s one of the best out there. It has a full 5-star rating on ProductHunt due to its excellent platform support and feature set.
3. Otter.ai is about the same age as Avoma, so it’s also one of the original AI meeting assistants. It also has an excellent reputation, with a 4.9-star rating on ProductHunt. Though it’s also feature-rich with excellent platform support, the main complaint is that updates don’t happen very frequently. It's an easy-to-use product that works with all your meeting apps.
4. Laxis is an intelligent virtual assistant that can capture conversations and help to make meetings more productive and enjoyable. You can extract insights, action items, and key quotes from (and across!) meetings using simple transcription and personalized templates.
5. Fathom is a 100% free tool that integrates with Zoom to provide meeting memory recall and sharing functionality, as well as automatic Slack and CRM integration.
6. Fireflies.ai supports Zoom, Google Meet, and Teams, with a full set of features and excellent CRM support. On the downside, it doesn’t score as well in reviews, getting only 3 out of 5 stars. The bad reviews mostly complain about meeting transcription errors and billing problems, but it’s worth mentioning that Fireflies has been updated a few times since.

Frequently Asked Questions

Should I be concerned about privacy with AI listening in on all my meetings?

You should always have concerns, yes. Most of these AI assistants use excellent encryption and authentication practices, but you should always pay close attention to the company’s privacy policy and look out for user reviews. That’s the only way to know for sure if your private meeting discussions will remain confidential.

Are the transcripts accurate?

The AI meeting assistant is essentially computer software listening to your voice and trying to understand what you’re saying. It will make mistakes. There are few (if any) that are always perfectly accurate in every meeting. At the moment, the standard is “reasonably accurate.” This has already improved over time and will continue to do so. But always check the transcript for any errors.

Are AI meeting assistants worth the price?

Only you will know if the benefits of having a system that can automatically transcribe your meetings, identify keywords, build a searchable index, allow collaboration, and integrate better workflow are worth $10 or $20 per month. The fact is that both smaller and larger organizations can benefit a lot from AI meeting assistants, so why not yours?