How Meeting Analysis Platforms Utilize ASR Solutions
Aimie Ye
If you're like most business professionals, you probably spend a good chunk of your day in meetings. But you probably also hate all of the work that comes post-meeting, things like drafting meeting minutes, assigning tasks, and following up with the appropriate people. All of this takes you away from more important work you could be doing.
Meeting analysis platforms are here to take on much of this rote work. By utilizing top ASR tools, these platforms can automatically convert meetings into text, so you can get a clear understanding of what transpired during the meeting. Not only will this save you time, but it will also help improve decision-making and communication within your organization.
In this article, we'll look at what meeting analysis platforms are, their benefits for your business, and how they benefit from using state-of-the-art speech-to-text systems like Deepgram. Let's jump in.
What is a Meeting Analysis Platform?
A meeting analysis platform is a software application that uses automatic speech recognition (ASR) to transcribe meeting minutes into text. This text can then be analyzed and searched, so that you can easily find the information you're looking for. ASR is a technology that has been around for decades, but it's only recently that it's become accurate enough to be used for transcribing audio in dynamic environments like meetings.
What are the Main ASR Features used by Meeting Analysis Platforms?
Meeting analysis platforms offer a number of specific features that can support your business to better handle meetings and save time. Let's look at a few of the most important features offered by top meeting analysis platforms.
Separation of Speakers
Diarization breaks up a transcription by who said what, similar to a movie script. This makes it easier to know who said what during a meeting. Diarization can also be used to understand how much different people are talking, and ensure that everyone's voices are being heard.
Topic Detection
Topic detection is exactly what it sounds like-identifying the topic of a meeting or part of a meeting. This can make it easier to go back to meeting transcriptions in the future; instead of trying to figure out what date you talked about what thing, you can simply look through the list of topics and identify the correct meeting that way.
Summarization
Summarization-which provides a summary of what was said during a meeting-makes it easy to understand what was said, but can also make it possible to come back, months or years in the future, and find specific meeting notes that you might be looking for. It also provides a quick and easy way for anyone who didn't attend to know what was covered in the meeting.
Search
Related to the above, having a catalog of meeting transcriptions makes it easy to find specific information, even long after the fact. You can also look for specific product names, issue types, etc., across meetings to try and identify patterns in your organization.
How are Meeting Analytics Platforms Beneficial for Businesses?
There are several benefits for your organization that come with the use of these meeting management tools. Let's take a look at the specifics.
Action Item Lists
Using topic detection, diarization, and summarization together, some meeting analytics platforms can even create a list of follow-up tasks, and potentially assign them to specific people, just based on the transcript of the meeting. UpdateAI, for example, integrates with Zoom to automatically capture action items from virtual meetings.
Record Decisions
Ever leave a meeting and suddenly not remember what was decided about a specific point for discussion? Meetings analysis platforms like adam.ai provide, along with their other features, a way to capture what decisions were made so that there's no confusion after the fact.
Time Savings
You no longer have to spend hours transcribing meeting minutes yourself. The platform will do it for you, so you can focus on other tasks. Not only does this save you time, but because cutting-edge ASR solutions like Deepgram work in almost real time, you can have transcripts available immediately after meetings end, rather than hours or days later.
Improved Decision-Making
With all of the meeting information in one place, it becomes easier to make decisions based on what was discussed. Information that was shared can be revisited and who volunteered what information can be identified for any follow-up questions.
Better Communication
These platforms can also improve communication within your organization by making meeting information more accessible to everyone. Plus, with features like topic detection and summarization provided by top ASR solutions, as discussed above, anyone who missed the meeting or wants to check in can easily see what was discussed and if it's worth reading the whole transcript or watching a recording.
Taking Attendance
Remember who was at which meeting can be challenging. With features like diarization that can identify individual speakers, meeting transcripts can also be used to determine who was present (assuming they participated in the meeting).
Easier Note-Taking
If you've ever had to take notes for a meeting while also trying to participate, you know that it can be a challenge. With a meeting analytics platform, though, you're free to focus on the content of the meeting itself, and let the tool take your notes for you-you can revisit everything you might need after the meeting ends.
How to Choose a Meetings Analytics Platform
There are many meeting analysis platforms on the market, so how do you choose the right one for your organization? The top three factors to consider are:
Ease of use: You want a platform that's easy to use, so you don't waste time trying to figure out how to use it.
Pricing: The platform should be affordable for your organization and provide good value by offering relevant features.
Accuracy: The platform should be able to transcribe meeting minutes with a high degree of accuracy.
Although we listed it third here, accuracy is perhaps the most important consideration, as any meeting analysis platform is only going to be as good as the transcripts that it generates. Let's take a look at what automatic speech recognition is, and why speech-to-text tools for meeting analysis platforms are so important when it comes to accuracy.
Automatic Speech Recognition for Meetings Analysis Platforms
A core functionality of any meeting analysis platform is automatic speech recognition (ASR). Let's look at what ASR is, and why it's important for meeting analysis platforms.
What is ASR?
ASR is a technology that converts speech into text. ASR technology works by taking in an audio file or stream, and output the text of what was said. This transcript can then be used for a variety of purposes by a meeting analysis platform.
Why is ASR Important for Meeting Analysis Platforms?
ASR is important because it enables meeting analysis platforms to automatically transcribe contents of the conversation. Because this is a key component of what meeting analysis platforms do, having a fast, accurate ASR solution behind the scenes is absolutely critical to delivering an excellent user experience. Plus, with the addition of natural language processing and understanding technologies to ASR, these meeting analysis providers can go even further by, for example, using the accurate transcriptions from an ASR provider to create summaries of key points and identifying tasks for follow up.
