You will be able to set up meeting transcription that participants have agreed to and your company allows.
Before you use AI to take notes in a meeting, check that your company approves the tool. Then tell everyone on the call that you'd like to record, before anything substantive is said. AI meeting notes are one of the most promising uses of AI at work, and they are also one of the easiest to get wrong. Many of the mistakes happen before the meeting starts.
Last month Jun Wei, the account manager you met in module 3, joined a video call with a new client. The participant list included an extra name, "Notetaker". It belonged to someone on the client's side, and nobody had mentioned it. Halfway through the call, the client's HR manager made a frank remark about a colleague. The manager then stopped and asked whether the call was being recorded. Nobody was quite sure, and the rest of the call was noticeably more guarded. Jun Wei now opens every client call with one sentence about recording.
There are two broad kinds of tool. The first is built-in recording and transcription. Video call apps now record the call and convert it to text, and some also produce an AI summary at the end. The second is a separate note-taking tool that records, transcribes and summarises a meeting. Some note-taking tools join calls automatically as a participant. This often happens because someone connected the tool to their calendar and forgot about it.
Both kinds work the same way underneath. The audio is recorded and sent to a service that converts speech to text. The text is kept, often together with the recording. A meeting therefore produces three things that did not exist before: a recording, a transcript and a summary. Each of them can be stored, searched and shared.
Before you use any of these tools for work, check which ones your company approves, the way you learned in lesson 2.3. An unapproved note-taker that joins client calls on your behalf is a data problem as well as a matter of etiquette.
The basic rule is to tell participants before you record and get their agreement. Do it at the start, before anything substantive is said, so nobody finds out partway through.
This matters most with clients and anyone else from outside the company. They don't know your tools or policies, and many organisations have their own rules about being recorded. Some clients will refuse, and that is their decision. If anyone says no, respect it and don't record. Mention the recording in the meeting invitation as well as at the start of the call, so people can raise concerns in advance.
A short, plain notice works best. You might ask to record and transcribe the call so you can send an accurate summary afterwards. Then say that the recording stays within the company and is deleted once the summary is agreed, and ask whether everyone is comfortable with that. Only say things that are true for your own setup. Check how long your tool keeps recordings before you promise anything about deletion.
Inside your own company, follow company rules. Even where recording is routine, a quick mention at the start is courteous and avoids the awkward moment when someone realises late.
A meeting recording is full of personal data: names, voices, opinions and sometimes remarks about other people. It can also hold confidential business data, such as prices, client plans and internal disagreements. Everything in module 2 applies to recordings. Company rules and the PDPA govern how recordings and transcripts are stored and shared.
In practice, keep recordings and transcripts in approved company storage. Share them only with people who need them, and delete them when the company's retention rules say so. Don't forward a full transcript when a summary would do. A client-call transcript sent to the wrong person is a much bigger problem than a summary sent to the wrong person, because the transcript holds everything everyone said.
Speech-to-text has improved a great deal, but its errors are not random. They cluster around names, numbers, accents and local terms, which are often the details that matter most:
A client's name may be transcribed as a common word. "Fifteen" and "fifty" are easily confused. Singapore place names, company abbreviations, Singlish and the language mixing common in local meetings can all come out garbled. A product code or sum of money said quickly may be transcribed wrongly in a way that still looks plausible on the page.
Treat a transcript as a draft record. It is very good for finding what was discussed and roughly when. It is much less reliable for exactly who, exactly how much and exactly what date. Before you rely on a transcript, check the names, numbers, amounts, dates, product codes and local terms in it. Lesson 7.3 builds your checking process around these errors.
Jun Wei now opens every client call with a single sentence. Check which transcription tools your company approves, then write the sentence you will use.
Check which transcription tools your company approves and write the one-sentence notice you will use to ask participants for permission to record.
Junxiong-WFG Organisation is an authorised representative of AIA Financial Advisers Private Limited (Reg. No. 201715016G).