AI Note Taking and Research Assistants are Amazing. Here’s Why You Should Use Them.

I think back on 25 years of internet driven technological marvels and find myself awkwardly excited about what comes next. The internet services which have become ubiquitous in our daily lives, such as Google Search, Gmail, Google Maps, and YouTube, are omnipresent in nearly everything we do.  To suddenly exist without them would be a profound inconvenience, and in the context of a corporate environment, the sudden absence of these technologies can bring operations to a dead stop. It’s easy to become dependent on a technology or internet service which “just works” because of its inherent reliability and utility. And now, we enter the era of AI driven services, which for all intents and purposes, enhance the efficacy of research and note taking automation by effectively performing intellectual tasks for us. 

I find myself marveling at the artistic creations of DALLE, intrigued by the poetry authored by Claude, and inspired by the intellectual capability of ChatGPT. Google’s Gemini, above all else, presents an uncanny ability to remain conversational, no matter the topic, which leaves me feeling unsettled at times when I get better perspective on introspective considerations I ask of these AI platforms than I ever could have anticipated. Needless to say, AI is still a burgeoning technology that I surmise we don’t fully understand. And that is fascinating, because it means new territory – new possibilities – and new promise of supercharging human intellectual ability. 

But the goal of this article is not to rant about the philosophical considerations of what AI means for humanity – far from it – my intent here is to share my perspective on two AI tools which I find absolutely astounding. And practical, in the context of corporate application. 

For as long as i’ve been in business – i’ve been a note taker. I first adopted the habit after reading the Four Hour Work Week, in which Tim Ferriss asserted that compulsive note taking during meetings, discussions, and planning sessions resulted in more impactful productivity. I’ve found that to be the case in most instances, and to this day, I use hand written notes to organize the dozens upon dozens of tasks I have to complete each week in order to advance client projects. But one challenge i’ve never been able to solve is taking notes during meetings while i’m presenting, or leading. It is impossible to simultaneously host a meeting, navigate the discussion, and document all the key points. Recording and listening to the meeting again? Sure – that’s easy enough. But what if you don’t want to listen to yourself, or your colleagues, for the duration of the call to find a few key points? Or to create action items? Well…fortunately enough…there’s a solution for this. 

I was recently introduced to “Meet Geek”. I suspect this salient technology will ultimately become as fundamental to digital meetings as Zoom itself – if only to serve as the pinnacle resource to document the key moments of a conversation. 

The tool has a myriad of features, but what constantly impresses the hell out of me is the clarity and depth of the meeting transcriptions it kicks out: 

I never, ever could have created meeting notes that clear, concise, or poignant – even if my only task was to document the conversation. Meet Geek is able to swiftly catalog the highlights of a conversation and provide segmentation of the discussion in a meaningful way. I can only imagine how many impactful ideas, initiatives, or concepts were developed and lost in the discussions i’ve had, simply because there was no documentation to reiterate those key points a week or two later in planning sessions. Meet Geek effectively eliminates that loss, which affords a new opportunity to literally go back and review what mattered most. 

The tool provides what Meet Geek refers to as “Action Items and Topic Detection.”  The value in that is simple – you can methodically review the highlights of a conversation and pull out the topics which were relevant to a project. This is exceptionally useful in identifying and delegating projects to team members, depending on the nature of the work itself. The documentation of action items, automatically, provides administrators with an opportunity to define “next steps” and assign roles. That’s a project managers best friend, in SaaS form. 

In addition to Meet Geek, which is slowly integrating itself into my daily work regimen, i’ve developed a fascination with Google’s latest AI driven research assistant – Notebook LM. 

This product isn’t exactly a note taker – it’s more like having a very bright, capable, and methodical intern at your disposal to create compelling, source driven, overviews of broad documents. Looking to fully understand a complex concept based on several scientific articles? Need to consolidate the top level findings from a research study? Interested to develop an impression of financial market conditions in consideration of various socio political influences? Notebook LM can do that. And what’s even more ridiculous, is that Notebook LM can create an audio discussion around the topic, which actually sounds like two people hosting a podcast. 

The more source material you upload to Notebook LM, the more robust the output. I consider a tool like this to be exceptionally useful if you are tasked with understanding more about an industry, market, process, technique, or event that has a significant impact on a considerable decision. One of the most arduous challenges marketers face is developing a profound understanding of a client’s industry and competitive landscape. With access to resources like PEW and industry specific research repositories – Notebook LM makes it possible to create a poignant “brief” which is potent enough to afford a dynamic perspective on a subject you may not know much about. That’s invaluable when working in new industries. 

Google provides a general overview of Notebook LM’s capabilities – defining its principal activities as “Using Sources”, “Taking Notes”, “Reading”, and “Writing”. While these tasks sound inherently normal to AI functionality, Notebook LM takes this a bit further by creating tangible resources within each task category. You are, effectively, able to create meticulous resource guides which consolidate information in a way that is efficient and easy to consume. If you’re frequently charged with creating “summaries” for C-Level executives, this is the resource you’ve been missing.

NotebookLM is effectively a research tool designed to assist users in synthesizing information from various sources, including PDFs, Google Docs, and websites. That may not sound particularly ground-breaking, but it is, in fact, a resource that other AI systems have yet to produce. Notebook LM allows you to create notebooks for specific projects and upload relevant documents as sources, which affords the ability to use NotebookLM to answer questions, track down references, and generate different formats of summaries, including frequently asked questions, study guides, timelines, and briefing documents. That’s an ideal scenario for anyone who needs to factor broad scale editorial or create a content marketing strategy. 

So what’s to come of all this? What comes next? I would imagine the fusion of Meet Geek and Notebook LM as a nearly sentient digital assistant who can manage nearly any administrative or lower-level managerial task you throw at it. The ideal scenario – a system you can talk to, just as you would a colleague apt to assist with whatever marketing or advertising project you have in the works.