What's Next For Accounting? - Issue #63

🤖 Automate My Thing

Summarizing Meeting Transcripts

Let's use ChatGPT to generate a summary of our client meeting, and a list of action items. With recent updates to ChatGPT, this use-case got a lot more valuable.

You can now create persistent chats. That is, you can come back to them later via a static link. So once you have a transcript, be sure to select "New Chat" so you can come back to it later if needed.

I'm going to use the transcript of the most recent Cloud Accounting Pod episode. If you have a meeting transcript, use that. At the top of the message, I used the following prompt:

The result is pretty good. It doesn't know the difference between an ad & regular dialog, but you won't have that problem with your client meetings 😊

Now here's the catch: there's a maximum input prompt length. In this case I had to trim it down to about 1/3 of the total transcript length. GPT-4 is expected to support longer prompts, but the possible length will likely never be infinite.

So what does an automated version of this look like today? You need an automated way to fetch transcripts after each meeting. I think you can do this with Zoom natively, but it may be easier with a dedicated recorder like Grain.

Then it's a matter of:

  1. Splitting the transcript, according to the maximum allowed prompt length

  2. Summarizing the clips individually

  3. Joining the individual summaries, saving those & the action items somewhere useful, like your CRM or task management system

Look for this to soon become a standard feature for meeting apps, but in the meantime let me know if you set this up, or if you're feeling intimidated this would be a great opportunity to contract with your first no-code expert.

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