In today’s digital age, virtual meetings have become a staple in our professional lives. Whether you’re working remotely or collaborating with global teams, recording these meetings can be incredibly beneficial.
Here, the Meeting Canary team looks at the best ways to record meetings across common platforms and explains how you can go beyond with AI tools that provide actions, insights, and learnings following each session and do not compromise security.
Why record your meetings?
Recording meetings ensures that no detail is missed and it allows participants to revisit discussions and decisions. It also helps those who couldn’t attend to catch up. Here are three key benefits:
- Accurate record keeping: Capture every detail without relying on memory.
- Enhanced collaboration: Share recordings with team members to ensure everyone is on the same page.
- Training and development: Use recordings for training new employees or for personal development.
How to record a call on common platforms
Different platforms offer various ways to record meetings. Here’s a quick guide:
- Zoom:
- Built-in recording: Zoom offers a built-in recording feature. Simply click the “Record” button during your meeting.
- Cloud storage: Save recordings to the cloud for easy access and sharing.
- Microsoft Teams:
- Meeting recording app: Use the built-in recording feature by clicking on “More options” (three dots) and selecting “Start recording”.
- Transcription: Teams also offers transcription services, making it easier to search through meeting content.
- Google Meet:
- Record meeting: Click on the three dots in the bottom right corner and select “Record meeting”.
- Google Drive: Recordings are saved directly to Google Drive, making them easy to share.
- Skype:
- Recording feature: Click the “More options” button and select “Start recording”.
- Notification: All participants are notified when a recording starts, ensuring transparency.
Going beyond with AI tools
Recording meetings is just the beginning. AI tools can take your meeting recordings to the next level by providing actionable insights and learnings.
- Meeting transcription software:
- Automated transcriptions: Tools like Otter.ai and Rev can transcribe your meetings in real-time, making it easier to review and search for specific information.
- Keyword highlights: Identify key points and action items quickly.
- AI-powered insights:
- Sentiment analysis: Understand the tone and sentiment of the meeting to gauge team morale and engagement.
- Action items: Automatically extract action items and follow-up tasks from the meeting.
- Learning and development:
- Personalised feedback: AI tools can provide feedback on communication styles and suggest improvements.
- Training modules: Create training modules based on recorded meetings to help new employees get up to speed.
Best practices for recording meetings
To get the most out of your meeting recordings, follow these best practices:
- Inform participants: Always inform participants that the meeting will be recorded.
- Store securely: Ensure recordings are stored securely and access is restricted to authorised personnel.
- Review regularly: Regularly review recordings to extract valuable insights and improve future meetings.
But hold on, what’s the point of recording all my meetings?
I’ve worked in tech for decades – collectively across the whole team it’s hundreds of years – and many years ago I coined the phrase ‘BYC Technology’. This stands for ‘Because You Can’ and applies to many tech ideas that came and went – things like AI-enabled glasses or vomit-inducing 3D worlds. Why were they built? ‘Because You Can’!
And meeting recordings are in the BYC tech world. Truly how many times have you actually rewatched a meeting recording? (And don’t answer that if you are a Lawyer or in HR – your needs are quite different!)
So the approach that Meeting Canary has taken is different. We DON’T record meetings! That doesn’t mean you can’t use the platforms listed above to record – that’s up to you. What Meeting Canary does is use the very latest in AI to summarise and build action points that can then be used as reminders for later meetings in a series and are able to be searched across the organisation – so you can mine your own data and be as efficient as possible.
Finally, one critical differentiator for Meeting Canary is this – we don’t even store the summaries or the action points on our own servers (like all the services listed above have to). Instead we simply place them inside your own ‘tenant’ – so for example in Teams this means they reside in the company’s own Teams chat and not with us.
This delivers the highest level of security possible, and just as importantly, it allows Meeting Canary to add all sorts of additional functionality to the content, such as directing actions towards the intended recipient before the next meeting, reducing (and proving that this has occurred) that awful start to a meeting where everyone is excuse generating for not actioning their actions!
This way Meeting Canary is not BYC technology rather a new acronym I’ve just made – it’s BYJS Technology. Because You Just Should.