How to Use ChatGPT for Meeting Notes: Pros, Cons, and Tips

Since its release in late 2022, ChatGPT has taken the world by storm. There are a few key ways companies can use ChatGPT or AI in the workplace to enhance the employee and customer experience. We’ll explore how to use ChatGPT for meeting minutes and notes and examine why Fellow is a better alternative.

• What is ChatGPT?
• Can you use ChatGPT for meeting notes and minutes?
• Pros and cons of using AI for meeting minutes and notes
• How to use ChatGPT for meeting notes and minutes
• Fellow: A better alternative
• Free meeting minutes and notes templates
• Elevate your note-taking game with Fellow

Can you use ChatGPT for meeting notes and minutes?

ChatGPT can be used to generate meeting notes and minutes with the right instructions and information, streamlining the note-taking process. ChatGPT can pull out important details from meeting transcripts to include in automated notes and minutes, such as:

• Date, time, attendees
• Meeting agenda items covered
• Key discussion points
• Decisions made
• Action items and tasks assigned
• Follow-up tasks ahead of the next meeting

However, ChatGPT meeting minutes can lack nuance and fail to capture collaborative inputs from the meeting participants. For more thorough and accurate AI meeting notes and minutes, your organization should consider an AI meeting management platform built exactly for this purpose, like Fellow.

Pros and cons of using ChatGPT for meeting minutes and notes

Pros

• Allows for faster processes: When you provide ChatGPT with enough meeting details, it can quickly summarize key points, follow-up tasks, and action items, automating meeting notes. It works well for teams that aren’t too concerned about details and accuracy. ChatGPT’s response time is quick, so it’s more suited for a last-minute, high-level meeting summary rather than detailed notes.
• Is cost-efficient: ChatGPT has a free version making it a cost-effective alternative for capturing key points. Startups operating on a tight budget can take advantage of this and use funds they would have allocated to software for other necessary resources. However, its paid subscription service, ChatGPT Plus, is $20 per month.
• Is multilingual: ChatGPT’s translation capabilities can benefit teammates who work in different languages. The next time you need to send a copy of your meeting minutes to a colleague in a new language, use ChatGPT to translate it for you. 

Cons

• Increases risk for mistakes: As innovative as it is, ChatGPT can’t read your mind. It isn’t a perfect product, and using it to create your meeting minutes does increase the risk of errors. Key points that may have been of great importance in your virtual meeting may not be prioritized by ChatGPT’s algorithm and could be left out of your meeting minutes entirely, making them less accurate overall.
• Is not collaborative: Creating meeting minutes with ChatGPT may be a time-saver, but using ChatGPT to automate meeting notes means less collaboration from the team. With ChatGPT-generated meeting minutes, individual teammates can’t add their key takeaways, action items, and other important details.
• Has privacy concerns: Some companies are being asked not to enter sensitive information into ChatGPT due to compliance concerns with third-party software. While many AI note takers are very secure, you need to evaluate them thoroughly.

How to use ChatGPT for meeting notes and minutes

To use ChatGPT for meeting summary and minutes, you must first transcribe your virtual meeting using a tool like Fellow. Once your meeting ends, download the meeting transcripts from whichever meeting transcription software you used. If you aren’t using software, you’ll have to transcribe your meeting into text manually.

Once the transcription is ready, copy and paste your transcript into ChatGPT. Keep in mind that ChatGPT’s token limits vary by version and account type.

Above the text, prompt ChatGPT to summarize the transcript into concise meeting notes and minutes. For example, you could use a prompt like: “Summarize the following meeting transcript into a set of meeting notes and minutes. Include the date, time, attendees, agenda items discussed, key highlights, decisions made, and action items.”

Don’t forget to review the minutes generated by ChatGPT. to ensure you havea accurate meeting notes. The meeting notes and minutes should capture the following key details, so make any necessary corrections.

• Date and time: Include details about when the meeting occurred for future reference. If necessary, add context about why the meeting was held on a certain day or at a specific time. Use timestamps to tag individual colleagues for their awareness or input. 
• Name of present and absent attendees: List the names of all members in attendance and the names of those who weren’t able to make it. During the meeting, jot down who spoke about specific topics and include the names of those who have been assigned action items.
• Summary of talking points: Your meeting agenda should be used to outline your meeting minutes. Under each talking point in the agenda, add details, including any outcomes and major decisions the group makes.  
• Key decisions and action items: Record decisions and action items as they happen. This will enable the team to hold each other accountable for their responsibilities and support one another in working through tasks that contribute to the group’s overall success.
• Next steps: Write down what tangible next steps and assigned tasks the group needs to complete before the next meeting. These can include scheduling a follow-up meeting or check-in call and emailing a copy of the meeting minutes once they’re ready for distribution. 

Fellow: A better alternative for AI meeting notes, minutes, and action items

While ChatGPT can create basic meeting notes and minutes, Fellow is a dedicated all-in-one AI note taker that’s purpose-built to effortlessly capture and summarize notes, minutes, decisions, and action items with powerful AI features.

Here’s how you can leverage Fellow for your next meeting:

• Take collaborative meeting minutes and notes
• Keep an accurate record of decisions
• Link meeting minutes to calendar events
• Share notes and minutes with stakeholders

1Take collaborative meeting minutes and notes

Now that you know all about ChatGPT and how to use it, let’s talk about a better alternative for taking meeting minutes: Fellow. Fellow can autojoin calls in Zoom, Google Meet, or Microsoft Teams to create summaries, transcriptions, and recordings. Or, upload video or audio files to be summarized and transcribed.

Everyone can contribute their ideas to the collaborative meeting agenda before, during, and after each meeting. With Fellow, your meeting minutes and transcript will be secure, free from mistakes, and have all the context needed to make decisions.

2Keep an accurate record of decisions 

In addition to real-time note taking, Fellow’s powerful AI features can help automate the entire process for you.

With Fellow, you can record and transcribe meetings automatically, capturing an accurate record of discussions and key decisions as they happen. The AI meeting summary feature will then generate meeting chapters to organize key takeaways and action items based on the meeting discussion, so every team member can stay aligned. Fellow also cuts out unnecessary details like small talk, so you only get the info you need, always captured accurately.

These searchable meeting transcripts, video recordings, and AI meeting summaries are accessible from your meeting notes after the call ends — the AI meeting summary is embedded at the top of the meeting notes, along with the transcript and summary. This makes it easy to review important details and next steps.

3Link meeting minutes to calendar events

When you are using various tools to generate separate meeting transcripts and summaries, it can be easy to lose track of the various files and even harder to refer back to past notes after the fact. In Fellow, your meeting notes, AI transcriptions and summaries are automatically linked directly to your calendar events so everything can be found in one central place.

During the meeting, Fellow’s Chrome extensions and native integrations with your preferred video conferencing tools allow you to access your meeting notes directly in your video conferencing platform. Take notes, document action items, and leave comments — all without leaving your video call.

4Share notes and minutes with stakeholders

Fellow allows you to easily share meeting notes with attendees after the meeting ends to keep everyone on the same page. You can effortlessly link to and share the AI summary or specific parts of your transcripts recordings, enabling you to provide context to stakeholders without them wading through the entire transcript. If you prefer to send the notes to the stakeholders instead, Fellow provides an option to embed the AI summary as well so that they have full context. You can also create video clips of important moments to share or add to a future meeting agenda.

Set every meeting up for success with these free meeting minutes and notes templates

When it comes to preparing for meetings, you don’t need to start from scratch! Fellow offers 500+ pre-built customizable templates to help structure your meeting, facilitate collaboration, and document additional context so that the meeting minutes are as helpful as possible. We’ve included three of our most popular templates below.

Automate your note-taking game with Fellow

While ChatGPT can produce meeting minutes, there is quite a lot of admin work required to generate these notes, and still more work to ensure that these meeting minutes are accurate and stored in a way that makes them easy to find. Instead of generating a transcript via a third-party tool and uploading the transcript to ChatGPT, Fellow provides a more automatic alternative for detailed meeting minutes.

Simply invite Fellow to join your call and the recording, transcription, and meeting summary is all done automatically. Fellow also makes it easy to share and refer back to these notes by linking them directly to the calendar event. No need to figure out where to store the meeting minutes outputted by ChatGPT.

Fellow also offers advanced features such as collaborative meeting agendas, tracking of assigned tasks, and integrations for project management tools so that you can bring your meeting notes to the next level and save your team valuable time. Fellow even has a library of 500+ meeting templates you can use to make sure your meeting runs productively and the resulting notes are more organized and accurate.

Stop wasting time with both manual note taking and a messy, inaccurate note-taking process like you get with ChatGPT. Get started today!