From the Editor's Desk

Hacking our way to better team meetings

As someone who takes plenty of notes, I’m always on the lookout for tools and strategies that can help me to refine my own note-taking process (such as the Cornell Method). And while I generally prefer pen and paper (because it’s shown to help with retention and synthesis), there’s no denying that technology can help to enhance our built-up abilities. This is especially true in situations such as meetings, where actively participating and taking notes at the same time can be in conflict with one another. The distraction of looking down to jot down notes or tapping away at the keyboard can make it hard to stay engaged in the conversation, as it forces us to make quick decisions about what details are important, and there’s always the risk of missing important details while trying to capture previous ones. Not to mention, when faced with back-to-back-to-back meetings, the challenge of summarizing and extracting important details from pages of notes is compounding – and when considered at a group level, there is significant individual and group time waste in modern business with these types of administrative overhead.

Faced with these problems on a daily basis, my team – a small tiger team I like to call OCTO (Office of the CTO) – saw an opportunity to use AI to augment our team meetings. They have developed a simple, and straightforward proof of concept for ourselves, that uses AWS services like Lambda, Transcribe, and Bedrock to transcribe and summarize our virtual team meetings. It allows us to gather notes from our meetings, but stay focused on the conversation itself, as the granular details of the discussion are automatically captured (it even creates a list of to-dos). And today, we’re open sourcing the tool, which our team calls “Distill”, in the hopes that others might find this useful as well: https://github.com/aws-samples/amazon-bedrock-audio-summarizer.

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