AI Meeting Notes for Beginners: Save 5 Hours a Week

This course contains the use of artificial intelligence. The lectures are narrated by an AI voice, and the slides were produced with AI assistance. The method, the examples, and the workflow are my own, tested on my own meetings.

The call ended. You didn't close your laptop. You opened a blank document, and spent the next twenty minutes writing up a meeting you had just been in.

You were already there. Then you went through the whole thing again.

If that's your afternoon, this course was built for you.

Do the math first

Open last week's calendar. Count your meetings. Then count the minutes you spent writing notes after each one.

Fifteen meetings at twenty minutes each is five hours. A full afternoon, every single week. Your number might be smaller than that, and you should work it out rather than take mine. The first lecture asks you to do that math on your own calendar. Near the end of the course, you do it again, this time with two numbers, because the writing goes away and the reading does not. I never tell you what you saved. I have never seen your calendar.

Why this course is different: kaizen

I'm Japanese, and I grew up with kaizen. Small improvements, repeated, one at a time.

You've probably tried the other way. A new app, a new template, all starting Monday. That rarely lasts. By Friday you're back to typing notes by hand.

So this course is built in four stages, and you take them one at a time.

• Before the meeting: the recording starts without you having to remember it.

• During the meeting: you say three specific things out loud, and stop doing three others.

• After the meeting: a transcript becomes a summary, and then action items with a name, a task, and a date.

• Sharing: the notes go where your team already reads, while the call is still ending. And you stop writing the lines you send every week from scratch.

You take one stage, run it in one real meeting, and keep it only if it survives. That meeting is your test. Four stages, four meetings. Not four months of rebuilding how you work.

No code. None.

There is no programming in this course, and nothing complicated to install. If you can send an email, you can do everything here. We connect to Zoom, Google Meet, and Microsoft Teams, and I show you why you connect your calendar rather than the video app itself.

A few honest things up front

I do not quote prices or free plan limits anywhere in this course. Companies change them, and a number I quote today could be wrong by the time you watch this. Instead, I show you how to read a pricing page yourself, and how to stay inside a free plan while you find out whether this works for you.

The lectures are narrated slides. The setup lecture uses annotated screenshots rather than a screen recording, so you can pause on a screen for as long as you need.

The examples use Otter and ChatGPT, but this is not a certification course for any one product. What you are learning is the workflow, not the brand name, and it transfers.

I also point out where you need to check your own organization's rules on recording. Those rules differ by company and by country.

There is a lecture on multilingual meetings too. English is my second language, so I cover both sides: the meeting held in another language, and the meeting held in English where some people are working in their second one.

What you walk away with

No lecture is longer than seven minutes, and the whole course runs under ninety. By the end, your meeting notes will write themselves. Not perfectly, and not magically. Some weeks the AI will spell a name wrong. The promise was never a perfect document. It was that you'd stop dreading your notes.

Your next meeting is already on your calendar. Start there.