Taking meeting notes is a crucial task for any business, ensuring important decisions, actions, and discussions are captured accurately. With the rise of AI, many professionals are turning to tools like ChatGPT to streamline this process.
While the idea of using AI for meeting notes might sound straightforward, there’s more to it than simply transcribing conversations. ChatGPT offers powerful capabilities, but understanding how to leverage it effectively can make a significant difference in the quality of your notes.
This article discusses how businesses can use ChatGPT to create detailed, actionable meeting notes, offering insights into how this tool can be integrated into your existing workflow to enhance productivity and organization.
ChatGPT is admirably versatile and is an all-in-one AI solution for the majority of businesses working globally. While ChatGPT is capable of transcribing meetings and generating notes, it cannot do so natively. Instead, you’ll have to use ChatGPT’s Whisper API, which is designed specifically to manipulate audio files.
Here are the pros and cons of using ChatGPT for transcribing and generating transcripts.
Looking to transcribe and generate meeting notes with ChatGPT? Here are some benefits of choosing ChatGPT for such tasks.
Many businesses already have access to ChatGPT, making it an easy and cost-effective solution for meeting notes. There’s no need to purchase additional tools or subscriptions, as ChatGPT can be utilized right away with existing resources.
One of the biggest advantages of using ChatGPT is the ability to fully customize how meeting notes are structured. By providing specific prompts, you can have notes generated in the format that best suits your needs—whether it’s bulleted lists, detailed summaries, or action item highlights.
ChatGPT can quickly generate notes from key points or meeting transcripts, saving valuable time. This allows your team to focus more on the conversation itself, rather than being distracted by the need for manual note-taking.
ChatGPT can be prompted to prioritize important information, such as decisions, action points, and follow-ups. This ensures that critical details are captured clearly, making it easier to review and act on the notes after the meeting.
While ChatGPT is extremely useful for most tasks, there are a few reasons why it’s not suitable for meeting notes.
Unlike dedicated transcription tools such as Sonix, ChatGPT lacks certain specialized features that are designed specifically for handling meeting notes and transcriptions. Tools like Sonix offer functionalities such as multiple import/export formats, multi-speaker tracking, and easy-to-use editors, which can significantly streamline the process of managing meeting recordings.
Additionally, Sonix has built-in capabilities to clean up filler words and other unnecessary elements automatically, creating a more polished and professional transcript.
With ChatGPT, these processes often require manual input, such as editing out filler words or formatting speaker changes. This absence of specialized features can make ChatGPT less convenient compared to tools that are purpose-built for transcription, especially for users who require high precision and efficient post-processing of their meeting notes.
While ChatGPT can generate meeting notes, its transcription accuracy may not match that of dedicated transcription tools. For instance, platforms like Sonix offer up to 99% accuracy, which is critical for capturing verbatim meeting discussions.
ChatGPT’s ability to interpret and transcribe audio can sometimes lead to misinterpretations, especially with unclear speech or multiple speakers. This means additional manual effort may be required to ensure accuracy, which could diminish the time-saving benefit.
It’s important to remember that while ChatGPT is the most intelligent AI platform in the market, Open AI never intended to make it a transcription platform.
Integrating ChatGPT effectively into your workflow may involve a learning curve, especially for businesses that want to make use of more advanced features, such as customizing prompts or using the Whisper API for transcription.
Whisper API, for example, isn’t always straightforward, and technical expertise may be needed to implement it properly. This could require developers or technically savvy employees to manage, which might limit its accessibility for teams unfamiliar with such tools.
ChatGPT is a general-purpose AI, which means it doesn’t inherently know how your business or team operates. To get the most relevant and useful meeting notes, the model needs to be trained over time to better understand your specific requirements, such as recognizing key topics, decisions, or action items.
This requires continuous refinement of prompts and input, as well as testing different approaches, which may take time and effort before it reaches a level of accuracy and customization that works seamlessly for your needs.
We’ve established that using ChatGPT’s Whisper API for transcription isn’t convenient for most non-technical users. However, if you’re looking to try it out regardless, here’s how you can do that.
Whisper API turns your meeting audio into text. It supports many formats like MP3 or WAV, and all you need to do is upload your audio file. Below is the Python code to transcribe a meeting audio file:
import openai
# Open the audio file
audio_file = open(“/path/to/your/meeting.mp3”, “rb”)
# Transcribe using Whisper API
transcription = openai.Audio.transcribe(
model=”whisper-1″,
file=audio_file
)
# Print the transcript
print(transcription.text)
This code will give you a raw transcript of your meeting. Whisper API handles common formats and provides the transcription as plain text. You can use this transcript as the basis for your meeting notes.
Whisper API limits the size of each audio file to 25 MB. If your meeting recording is longer than that, you’ll need to split the audio into smaller parts. You can use a tool like PyDub in Python to handle this:
from pydub import AudioSegment
# Load your meeting audio file
audio = AudioSegment.from_mp3(“/path/to/your/meeting.mp3”)
# Split into 10-minute segments (time in milliseconds)
first_part = audio[:10*60*1000]
# Export the first 10 minutes of audio
first_part.export(“meeting_part1.mp3″, format=”mp3”)
Once you split the file, you can transcribe each part individually using the same Whisper API transcription code as above.
You can help Whisper better understand specific terms used in your meetings, such as technical terms or company names, by providing a prompt. This helps Whisper recognize and transcribe these words more accurately.
transcription = openai.Audio.transcriptions.create(
model=”whisper-1″,
file=audio_file,
prompt=”This meeting includes terms like SaaS, AI, GPT-4, and ChatGPT.”
)
# Print the improved transcript
print(transcription.text)
The prompt helps make sure that Whisper picks up on those terms more reliably, improving the quality of the transcription.
Now that you have the transcript, ChatGPT can help structure it into something that’s easy to read and act on. Instead of dealing with a raw transcript, you can use a simple prompt to get clear, organized notes.
For example, you can ask ChatGPT something like:
“Summarize the transcript by highlighting key discussion points, decisions made, and action items.”
This will break down the transcript into sections that are easy to review, and you can customize it depending on how you want your notes. Maybe you prefer bullet points or lists of tasks. You just have to prompt ChatGPT with the format you want, like:
“Please organize the notes as bullet points, separating the key discussions and actions needed.”
By adjusting how you ask ChatGPT, you can format the meeting notes in the style that fits your needs.
If there are specific terms, product names, or acronyms that Whisper didn’t get quite right, you can ask ChatGPT to make those corrections. Simply give it a prompt to clean up the language or adjust certain terms, like:
“Correct any mistakes and ensure that terms like ‘SaaS’ and ‘GPT-4’ are written correctly throughout.”
This extra step ensures your meeting notes are clear, accurate, and ready to share with your team.
After setting up the basics for generating meeting notes with ChatGPT, there are a few key tips that can help you improve the accuracy and usefulness of the final output. By keeping the following points in mind, you can ensure that your meeting notes are clear, well-structured, and actionable.
The quality of your audio file significantly impacts the accuracy of the transcription. Clear, high-quality recordings with minimal background noise result in better transcriptions. Make sure that participants are using good microphones and that the recording environment is quiet. Audio clarity will reduce errors, especially in recognizing specific words or speakers, making it easier for ChatGPT to process and summarize the content accurately.
ChatGPT works best when given clear instructions through prompts. To improve the quality of your meeting notes, use prompts to structure the output, clean up filler words, or focus on specific areas like action items or key decisions.
For example, prompts like “Organize the transcript into bullet points with key decisions and tasks” or “Summarize the discussion and remove filler words like ‘um’ and ‘ah’” can drastically improve the clarity and usability of the final notes.
Meetings with multiple people talking over each other, or excessive background conversations, can confuse the transcription process. Limiting crosstalk by encouraging participants to speak one at a time improves transcription quality.
If crosstalk occurs, you may need to edit the audio to remove overlapping conversations before sending it to Whisper for transcription. This makes it easier for ChatGPT to identify important content and produce coherent notes.
For meetings that involve technical or industry-specific jargon, it’s important to use prompts to help ChatGPT recognize and correctly transcribe those terms. Providing a list of key terms or acronyms ahead of time ensures that both Whisper and ChatGPT deliver more accurate and relevant output. This is especially useful in technical, legal, or specialized business discussions where accuracy matters most.
While ChatGPT is a powerful tool for transcribing and organizing meeting notes, it can be overly technical, requiring coding knowledge and specific setup steps. For businesses and individuals looking for a simpler, more user-friendly solution, Sonix offers a superior alternative.
Sonix provides 99% transcription accuracy thanks to its industry-leading speech-to-text algorithms, which significantly reduce the manual editing needed after transcription. With support for 49+ languages, Sonix is ideal for global teams or multilingual meetings, ensuring that no important detail is missed.
Beyond transcription, Sonix’s built-in AI analysis tools allow you to automatically generate meeting summaries, thematic analyses, and even sentiment analysis. This turns your raw transcripts into actionable insights without extra effort. Sonix’s AI tools also include custom prompts.
With custom prompts, you can revisit your transcripts and interact with them almost like having a conversation, further enhancing your productivity by allowing you to extract data without having to sift through it. Sonix also includes advanced bank-level security features to ensure your data remains private and protected.
Perhaps the biggest advantage is Sonix’s ease of use. There’s zero learning curve, making it accessible for anyone, regardless of technical background. Overall, Sonix offers a powerful, secure, and incredibly easy-to-use alternative to transcribing with ChatGPT, making it a go-to solution for businesses seeking efficiency and accuracy.
Looking to try out Sonix? Sign up for a 30-minute free trial today. No credit card required.
While ChatGPT offers a versatile solution for generating meeting notes through transcription, it can be too technical and cumbersome for many users. By leveraging tools like Sonix, you can achieve much higher transcription accuracy, with added benefits like AI-generated summaries, thematic analysis, and enhanced security, all with a much simpler, user-friendly interface.
For businesses that value efficiency, accuracy, and ease of use, Sonix provides a better alternative for managing and analyzing meeting content. Whether your priority is precision, multilingual support, or seamless integration, Sonix empowers you to capture and organize your meetings with minimal effort and maximum impact.
Recording meetings ensures you have an accurate audio record. Use reliable recording software or tools to capture high-quality audio. Ensure all participants are aware and consent to being recorded.
Remove irrelevant information and format the transcript for clarity. Eliminate timestamps and unnecessary details. Organize the transcript with clear sections and line breaks to help ChatGPT process the content effectively.
Yes, ChatGPT can generate notes in various formats. Specify your preferred format, such as bullet points, numbered lists, or headings, in your prompt to receive notes in the desired style.
ChatGPT-generated notes are generally accurate but should be reviewed for completeness. Editing and refining the notes ensures they accurately capture all key points, decisions, and action items from the meeting.
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