ai notes
How to check an AI meeting summary before you send it to anyone
An AI meeting summary is a first draft written by someone who was half-listening from the hallway. It's usually close. When it's wrong, it's wrong in a confident, nicely formatted way, and once it's in your stakeholders' inboxes, the summary becomes what happened.
Here's a five-minute check to run before you forward one. You need the summary and the transcript it was made from.
1. Find the words behind every decision
For each decision in the summary, search the transcript for the moment it was made. You're looking for a sentence where someone actually settled it: "Let's go with the API first", "OK, we'll keep the price."
- Found it: keep it, and paste the quote next to it if the decision matters.
- Found a discussion but no decision: downgrade it to an open question. This is the most common error. Summaries turn "we talked about X" into "we decided X".
- Found nothing: delete it.
2. Check who said it
For every action item, find the line where someone took it on. Then check that the name on that line is right.
On a Zoom, Meet or Teams call recorded by a bot, it often isn't. The bot hears one mixed audio track and has to guess which voice is which. When two people sound alike, or several share a conference-room microphone, it guesses wrong and the summary hands one person's task to someone else. Even Microsoft's own conference-room hardware labels people as "Speaker 1, 2 (Room name)" unless each person has enrolled a voice profile beforehand. More in Wrong speaker attribution in meeting transcripts.
If an owner is wrong, fix it before sending. A task assigned to the wrong person in writing is hard to walk back.
3. Check every number, date and name
Prices, deadlines, headcounts, customer names and product names are where transcription makes its quietest mistakes: "fifteen" vs "fifty", "the 13th" vs "the 30th", a customer name heard as a common word. Check each one against the transcript. If the transcript is unsure too, check with the person who said it.
4. Check for what's missing
Summaries over-weight the start of a meeting and the loudest stretch of it. Skim the last ten minutes of the transcript yourself. That's often where the real decisions happen ("so, to wrap up…"), and it's where a summary is most likely to be thin.
Also look for a disagreement that didn't end in agreement. If two people left the call with different understandings, the summary should say so, not paper over it.
5. Check the tone of anything about people
Summaries sometimes characterise people: "X was concerned", "Y pushed back". Make sure that's fair, and remember the person will read it. When in doubt, quote them instead of describing them.
A summary you don't have to check line by line
The checks above exist because most summaries are written from the transcript but don't point back to it. In Meetful, every decision, open question and action in the recap carries the exact words it came from, the line in the transcript, and the name of the person who said it. Each person's microphone is transcribed separately, so that name is the microphone the words arrived on, not a guess. Anything that can't be backed with a quote is marked unverified instead of being stated as fact.
You still read it before you send it. It just takes one minute instead of five. Free, no time limit on calls. See how it compares.
Read next
- Meeting decision log template
- Meeting action items template
- Google Meet transcript didn't generate? What to do