Meeting assistant

Taking meeting notes is a job that cannot be done while taking part in the meeting. The meeting assistant separates the two: you talk, the system writes. And it does not produce an ordinary summary, but the note an expert in your business would write, with the list of tasks promised in the meeting.

How it works

1. The meeting is held in PORTWARE's video or voice call screen.

2. The assistant is on request: it joins only when a participant starts it.

3. The moment it starts, everyone in the call and the channel's thread are told "this call is being recorded and will be transcribed"; anyone joining later sees it too.

4. Audio is captured per participant — each person's voice on its own channel.

5. When the call ends, the audio is transcribed and every sentence is merged under its speaker's name.

6. From the transcript, the note, decisions and actions are prepared and written onto the meeting's record.

Per-participant recording is the most reliable way to tell speakers apart: instead of trying to separate voices from one microphone, we already know who is on which channel.

An expert's note: why the assistant knows the business

A model that does not know the company's jargon mistakes jargon for names and names for jargon. So before writing the note, the assistant reads two things:

• The records the meeting named. The customers, colleagues, projects and products mentioned are matched in code, before the model is asked anything, and given to it as the database spells them. This glossary carries identity only — no status, amounts or dates — so the model cannot write "the project's real status" as though it had been said in the meeting.
• The company's own knowledge. Reviewed, company-scoped facts — what the company sells, who its customers are, what a field means — for comprehension only.

The note is written in the language spoken in the meeting: a Turkish meeting gets Turkish headings too.

Decisions and actions

Every action is listed as who, what and when, with the moment it was said marked in the transcript. An action with no owner says why it was not assigned.

• A task in one click. An action becomes a project task in one click: its owner assigned, its due date set, filed in the meeting's project if it has one, with its source in the meeting in the description.
• An activity in one click. Or it becomes an activity on the meeting.
• Pressing twice does not make two tasks. An action becomes a task once.
• Dismissing is recorded too. A wrong action is dismissed but the row stays, so the same mistake does not come back when the note is regenerated.

The records a meeting named are linked as well: on the customer's, project's or product's own screen, the meetings that mentioned it appear.

People have the last word

The note is a suggestion. Once someone has edited or approved it, regenerating never overwrites it; the previous version can be restored. The assistant is not allowed to destroy the work it exists to save.

Turkish

• Special terms. Terms specific to the company, the product and the system are given to the transcription engine in advance; otherwise "Cowork" turns into something else. Known pronunciations ("Tudu" → "To-Do") and accepted suffixes are written out in a table.
• Names and suffixes. Turkish names take suffixes ("Ahmet'in", "Ayşe'ye"); name matching strips them.

Telling the assistant from people

The assistant is not counted as a person in the participant list. Otherwise "five people attended the meeting" would be wrong.

Audio is not kept

The transcript and the note are permanent; the raw recordings are deleted on a set day, and the day they were deleted is recorded — "we promised and did it" is distinguishable from "there was nothing to delete". What the transcript does not cover (a dropped connection, a paused recording) is written out in the reader's own words.