In this post, I’ll describe how you can use GPT4All, an AI tool running locally on your computer, to create a reasonable first draft of meeting notes from a transcript. This tool is capable of processing text versions of meetings that have been created by tools like Whisper from audio recordings. By using GPT4All, the task of taking meeting notes becomes more manageable and efficient.
You need to tweak the standard settings of GPT4All’s AI model in order to obtain a large enough context window so that your AI engine can analyze the entire transcript and not just the last portion of it.
One-time Setup
- Install GPT4All, as outlined in an earlier blog post.
- Start GPT4All.
- Install the „Llama 3.1 8B Instruct 128k“ model: Models -> + Add Model -> search for „Llama 3.1 8B Instruct 128k“ -> Download
- Increase the context window:
- Chats -> load the „Llama 3.1 8B Instruct 128k“ model
- Settings -> Model -> Context Length: increase from default 2048 to 16384 (at least three times the number of words in your transcript; 8192 was not enough for a 3600 word transcript).
- Max Length: increase from 4096 to 8192 (this might not be needed if you want a short output).
Steps per Meeting Transcript
- Start GPT4All, load the „Llama 3.1 8B Instruct 128k“ model and start a new chat.
- Copy & paste this prompt into the „Send a message“ field. At the end, do not press enter, instead press Shift+Enter twice to insert a blank line, without sending the message:
Create a summary of the following meeting transcript. Use bullet points, include all topics, even those that were mentioned only briefly.
- Paste your meeting transcript into the message box, after the prompt and the newline. Then hit Enter to send the request and get a cup of water/tea/coffee while you wait for the reply.
- If the AI output has too few notes about some topics, ask follow-up questions like
Please elaborate more on the conference in ...
. - Copy the reply (output) to your word processor and review whether AI got the facts right.
Important: Review AI Output
Review whether AI got the facts right. AI tends to hallucinate and this tendency is amplified by audio transcription errors, interrupted sentences etc.
- AI might have reversed who is going to do what. For instance, when talking about an app, AI might think you are developing it, while in reality you are researching its usefulness and someone else would be doing the development.
- AI might mix up or group unrelated events, like a conference that is half a year ahead and a visit to relatives next weekend.
- In many places you’ll need to change „the speaker“ into the appropriate real name.
Conclusion
- AI can give you a good first draft of the meeting notes.
- You still need to take some notes during the meeting:
- important topics – AI might miss or inappropriately reduce a topic
- key facts and numbers – speech-to-text AI might miss or misunderstand key words
- key decisions – AI might misunderstand decision words as small remarks
- Do your review shortly (hours, at most a few days) after the meeting, so you can remember key facts that AI may have mixed up.