Category Archives: Management

The Art of Eavesdropping: A Guide to Recording & Transcribing Meetings

man working from home during a Zoom meeting. He wears a headset and sits at a desk with a laptop open in front of him. Display a blurred home office background. Include a summary of the meeting as a text box or virtual sticky note.

Are you tired of missing important details during meetings because you’re too busy speaking or taking notes? Do you wish you could record and transcribe your meetings without anyone noticing? You’re not alone! Many of us have been in this situation before, especially when we’re in a meeting and can’t take notes because we’re one of the speakers.

Problem

However, recording and transcribing meetings can be a hassle, especially when we’re using platforms like Zoom, Teams, or Slack. These tools allow us to discuss with many people, but they don’t always let us record without anyone noticing.

Solution

In this article, we’ll show you a simple and effective way to make a transcript of your meetings without breaking a sweat. We’ll use a few powerful tools to help you record and transcribe your meetings without anyone noticing.

Step 1: Setup Your Virtual Audio Source

To start, you need to download Blackhole a powerful tool that can merge and aggregate multiple sources into one single virtual source. Once installed (2 channels or 16 channels), you can see how to merge with this tutorial to Route Mic and System Audio.

Step 1: Record Your Meeting

We’ll use a tool called Voice Memo on Mac to record our meeting. This tool allows us to record our voice and audio from our headset + the output of your meeting tool (Zoom, Microsoft Tools, Google Meet).

Step 3: Use Aiko to Transcribe Your File

Once we’ve recorded our meeting, we’ll use Aiko to transcribe our file. Aiko is a AI powerful tool that can detect the language and translate it into a transcript. There is another similar tool Open Source called Vibe that does exactly the same.

Step 4: Make A Summary Of Your Transcript

Finally, let’s make a full summary in bullet point style with your favorite AI tool. I personally use Jan.ai which is quite handy for those kind of task. At that time of writing, Llama 3 8B Q4 is my favorite model.

Here is an example of prompt like for the summary:

Can you make a summary of this transcript in a bullet point style: {TRANSCRIPT}

Conclusion:

By following these simple steps, you’ll be able to record and transcribe your meetings without breaking a sweat and without anyone to notice it. Be kind and ask for permission as it’s not legal to record without asking consent. If it’s for your own use it might be okay but it’s a valid proof from a legal perspective.
You’ll never miss important details again, and you’ll be able to stay focused on the discussion. So, let’s get started and make transcription a breeze!

Benefits:

  • Record and transcribe your meetings without anyone noticing
  • Stay focused on the discussion and never miss important details
  • Use powerful tools to make transcription a breeze
  • Increase your productivity and efficiency
  • Improve your meeting notes and follow-up
  • Make a summary of it through your favorite AI tool

By using these tools and following these steps, you’ll be able to make transcription a breeze and stay on top of your meetings. So, what are you waiting for? Let’s get started and make transcription a part of your daily routine!

Next time, the idea would be to automatize all this process with FlowiseAI or Dify.ai and then published it automatically on my OneDrive while having the possibility to search through all the content with a RAG.

Please share in comments your thoughts and way you are building your day-to-day process.

What I’ve learned by being more than 2 years a SCRUM master

In my previous company, I’ve been a SCRUM master (in addition to my main job: project manager) for more than 2 years and as you know, we always learn from our own errors and success. That’s why I started to list of few thoughts and things that I’d like to avoid in similar situation/role:

  • Setup tools as soon as possible early in the project in order to automatize a lot of development process. The more you do before starting, the better it will be.
  • Force your team to have some pause during your sprint in order to cool down on stuff that are important to team eyes (update continuous environment, upgrade a library, research, etc.).
  • Team must justify the need of this time and not only in front of SCRUM master but also to product owner and even beyond to stakeholders.
  • When working with a deported team, meet as soon as possible the team in order to give them a perfect vision of the project and share PO & SCRUM Master charisma.
  • Give visibility with transparency to stakeholders on a sprint or release basis by giving:
    • Budget status
    • Global vision of the project (no features! Otherwise it’s taken as granted) usually give business value
    • Milestone /sprints
    • Backlog priorities
    • Risks
  • Challenge stories without bringing your knowledge but by confronting the stories from previous sprints
  • Get a commitment from the team
  • Resolve impediments as soon as possible
    • Anticipate backup plans (ex: someone working on another story) at the same time
  • Give as much as possible visibility to all the team on the upcoming sprints
  • Give time to SCRUM team for reading/studying PO stories
  • If building an online application, have at least 1 x UI/UX designer in the team
  • Don’t rush on cutting edge technology or if it’s required, team needs training on those new technologies or simply change the whole team

So far this is what I’ve encountered along my experience and personal suggestion. I can possibly update the list in the future.

If you’d like me to develop a specific topic enunciated above, please shoot a comment and I will do my best to have a post on it.