Automate creating minutes from board meetings

The challenge: Anyone who has been roped into being secretary for an HOA, community group or not-for-profit knows what a burden publishing minutes is without a professional admin. Plus, if you are busy recording what everyone else is saying you can’t participate yourself. Dissatisfaction on my own HOA prompted me to search out a low cost, fairly low-tech way to automate creating minutes. I’ve gotten so much interest from friends that I want to share it here.

The tech: Since our members and management are pretty tech-phobic making this work required staying with a single Zoom Pro account where members join as guests. We added a subscription to Otter.AI to transcribe and summarize the meeting., though we could have done this in Zoom.

We pull the summery into Word with Copilot to make the minutes to match the agenda. This approach still requires a human to review the output especially for attendance, which would have been automatic if we were all using a subscription to Teams or similar. But this works for our very low-tech group.

Using the AI summary - easiest:

1. Invite and admit Otter.AI to the meeting where it creates a summary and a transcript.

2. Open the agenda in Word and paste the summary at the bottom of the file. Use the prompt below to request Copilot produce minutes that follows the agenda.

3. Have a human correct the AI generated minutes, paying special attention to the attendees.

Prompt for working from a meeting summary

Using the AI transcript - TBD: