Get more from your meetings
Meetings are an integral part of the business world yet are often mismanaged, requiring too much time to document what is being said and decided. This takes a heavy toll on the efficiency of the organisation and prompts the need for a more efficient system.The EU-funded project DOCUMEET envisions a new system to manage each stage of a meeting. It is working on a solution that considers the whole life cycle of a meeting, from preparing and inviting participants to documenting and following up. Based on four key components — hardware platform, transcription module, summarisation module and meeting browser — the system offers access to agendas, transcriptions, audio recordings and summaries. It features different access levels and works with different types of businesses. Bringing together academics, telecommunications experts, digital services stakeholders and software specialists from different EU countries, the project began by defining the users and uses for DocuMeet. The team has already worked on the main modules related to building robust meeting transcription and summarisation models. It developed and tested a wireless microphone platform to record meetings in order to gather information for the project.Once completed, the project is expected to produce an integrated system for meeting, recording, transcription, analysis and summarisation, as well as for browsing through data gathered during meetings. The system will enable businesses to conduct more effective and time-efficient meetings that will encourage business competitiveness and profitability.The end-product will focus on organisations that conduct well-structured, formal meetings where DocuMeet is expected to meet user expectations. Importantly, while there are numerous meeting audio recorders on the market, none provide the quality audio for transcription that DocuMeet is offering. Currently available speech-to-text software also does not offer the sophisticated transcription and summarisation features proposed, positioning DocuMeet in a class on its own. Such a system could have many positive impacts on an organisation's efficiency and data gathering capabilities. In simpler terms, key meeting results — improvements, ideas, proposals, solutions — are much more likely to be put to good use and exploited with DocuMeet.
Keywords
Meetings, transcription, documentation, audio recording, summarisation, software, wireless microphone
