BE: The AI Notetaker Is Listening

This is the Business English Podcast. The AI note taker is listening. Welcome to the Business English Podcast from All Ears English. Get the English skills you need to achieve your dreams in global business.

For a presentation, a meeting, or your office party, this is Real Business English with your favorite American hosts, Lindsay and Aubrey, coming to you from Arizona and Colorado, USA.

Hey there, Aubrey. How's it going today? I'm great. How are you doing? Good, but I have a question for you. You ready? Yeah. So these days, are you using AI NoteTaker?

I'm trying to remember the name of the company. There's a bunch of companies that you can kind of plug into your Zoom now and it'll just take notes automatically in your meetings. Yeah. Do you use that?

Yes, I have not. I know a lot of the note takers will pop up on our live Zoom calls with the community, right? We're speaking practice, like all of the AI note takers. And there are quite a few different ones.

So yeah, I've been curious. And it's interesting because it makes me a little bit stressed out sometimes. I'm like, okay, now should I need to speak more clearly to make sure the notes are good? Right.

I know if you think about it, it's pretty crazy because before it was like we were just speaking and the words went away, evaporated into thin air. Now they're going somewhere. Right. And Zoom and Teams maybe just automatically transcribing what we say.

Right. Right. Usually they give you some kind of a notice that pops up. Yeah, the host usually approves it. Right. But that happens pretty often. Right.

And then people can read the notes later if they miss the call. So this is interesting. It's getting more and more important that we make sure that these AI note takers can capture information.

what someone who wasn't there missed, right? Who's in charge of what, what expectations. And if it's a jumble all over the place, then these tools aren't being put to use in the best way they could be. Yeah.

So it's super important now if we are running meetings in English and we are, you know, English, we're learning English and working on our English for business, that we do certain things that we be strategic. It's important that we be strategic about how we speak on these meetings. So we're going to get into this today. But Aubrey, why are we talking about business today?

What is this all about? This is very exciting. Our business English course is available right now for up to $100 off until Sunday, November 1st at midnight US time, New York time. And this is exciting.

We are including a free live kickoff workshop to get you focused and get you connected with our community. We're excited to meet you in these live workshops. Yeah, because I think nowadays what we really need is we need accountability. We need a little push in the beginning.

When we join something new, we're excited, but we need to know how am I going to get this done and how is this going to add to my professional skills, maybe help me get a raise in the future, that kind of thing, a promotion. So we're going to provide this workshop to come together. You'll get to meet us live on the call and you'll get clear instructions to get started. You'll get a couple of early tips on how to maximize this course, okay?

Awesome. So yes, you can see it right now at allersenglish.com slash business. Get into that course so you can be a part of the Allers English community. All right.

Sounds good. Aubrey, all right. Let's come back to AI note takers. Now we know that there's these things listening all the time. Oh my gosh. We think about it too much.

It'll make us crazy, but we can leverage this to stand out as a professional. So what do we do? What are some tips to handle this? So number one is to state the purpose upfront, right?

Start with why you're meeting, what outcome you need. You could say something like the goal today is to decide which approach we'll use, for example. I love that. It's being very explicit.

This is maybe something we didn't need to do before, although it probably was always a good idea. Right. Everyone on that call appreciates this. Definitely.

Right. Because I'm sure that people have been in companies where they're wondering why they're having a meeting about a meeting and it just seems meaningless. Right. So make it clear that you're as someone leading the meeting are maximizing people's time.

You could say by the end of this meeting, we should have an owner and a deadline for each action. Is that clear? Pretty clear, right? Yeah, right. So then when people are reading those notes, it'll be clear for them what was the stated objective and where the general discussion began.

Exactly. Exactly. And then context, huge. This could be time context or reason you're doing something context. What does this mean? Yeah, this is tricky.

So we don't ever want to assume that everyone reading the notes later knows all of the background. So anytime you can, add context for what you're talking about. For example, you could say, for context, we're doing this because the previous process caused delays, right? Any information you can give that will answer questions that might come up as they're listening.

Yeah, I think in general, assuming people need a little context is always a friendly professional move. This kind of goes back to my pet peeve that I mentioned earlier in the week on Allers English is that people just give me the time they want to meet and no time zone. That's lack of context. Right, right.

Exactly. We need to provide as many details as we can to make sure everyone's on the same page to make sure it's very clear. You know, you might refer to a project that there's a chance anyone reading the AI notes hadn't heard of yet. So you could say, when we say Project Atlas, we're referring to the customer migration work stream, for example.

And this allows people that weren't on the meeting to use the notes, again, to prepare for the next meeting, maybe if they missed it to review, or just to understand how a project is moving forward.

Right. And then this way the notes are helpful for anyone outside the immediate team, not just those who are already familiar with everything being discussed at the meeting. Yeah. What else should we do?

What about when it comes to making decisions? What do you think, Aubrey? Yes. We want to explicitly announce any decisions that are made on the call. You don't want to leave important conclusions buried in a discussion that, you know, then make it easy to lose them or not notice them.

Oh my gosh, so true. And again, these are all things that I think were true before of good communicators. Good communicators did this before, but now everyone has to do it. I think that's what this is all about, right?

So we might be going back and forth. Maybe we should do this. Maybe we, oh, what about this? Someone, hopefully the person leading the meeting needs to speak up at the end and say, just to confirm, we've decided to move forward with option B, for example.

Exactly. Or if no final decision is made, be clear about that, right? You could say this is a proposal, no final decision has been made yet. Yeah. So if you're not clear, what could happen here?

I mean, what could the AI do to make things harder? Yeah, there could be a possibility of, you know, maybe they could confuse a suggestion or a tentative agreement with a final decision. So yeah, it's important that we're clear with the way we phrase things. Right.

So in a way, you're kind of talking to the AI sort of now, right? I mean, you're talking to the people in the meeting, but you're also talking to the AI to clarify. Yeah, that's what's tricky when it's not transcribing word for word. Then, yeah, it's interpreting and you need to make sure that you're very clear with your language.

What about in terms of ownership? What do we mean by ownership? Yeah. So we want to name an owner and deadline for every action. So who is responsible for something?

We want to avoid vague statements like, we should follow up on this. Who should follow up? I feel like I've said that a million times and our team sings. It's very unclear.

No one follows up. We have to know who. That's right. So for example, Jason will send the revised proposal by Thursday. Okay. That's super clear. Crystal clear.

Yes. Or Paula owns the customer follow-up. Alex will provide the technical details by Tuesday. So this way, deadlines and the person in charge of it is super clear.

Yeah. And in the business English course, we talk a lot about modern terms. What are people using in the office space right now? What are they saying?

And owns is a big one. Ownership. You own this. I own the outcome here. You own this process. Owning a process is a very trendy term in business right now.

Exactly. Right. It just means to be responsible for it, but it's true. You are going to definitely hear that language. Yeah. What else do we need to know?

All right. You want to explain the reasoning behind important decisions, right? Not just conclusions. So for example, we're choosing option B because it's faster to implement, even though it has fewer customization options.

You're sort of anticipating questions that might be had by anyone reading the notes later. Yeah, it's like metacognition. It's like thinking about the way you're speaking, thinking about the way you're thinking. We kind of have to take that next step when we communicate this way.

For example, another one we could say, the main concern is the launch timeline, not the overall cost. You didn't have to say that because probably people know

That's the place this could be a little awkward if people already know that that's the concern, but someone has to say it for the AI. Exactly. And this is where it's smart to communicate and be really upfront with your team and share. There may be things that I'm stating just so the AI note taker captures it.

You could even name the employees who aren't on the call that you know are going to use this tool later. Sure. Yeah. That could add a personal touch. That's not a bad idea at all.

What else? Anything else we can do here? We have a few. All right. We also want to call out unresolved questions and dependencies, right? So we're wanting to clearly distinguish what's known, what's still open.

So for example, you could say, you know, this decision depends on finance confirming the budget. So just sort of clarifying what might be that you're waiting on. Yeah. Or risk.

The key risk is that the vendor may not deliver in time. And then there's another piece, Aubrey, around complete sentences. Instead of tracking off, I mean, do you feel like you sometimes trail off when you're talking to friends or just in your everyday speech at home? Do you trail off?

Absolutely. Definitely, right? We want to be clear and finish sentences so that transcripts and summaries are really clear. So here's an example. Instead of...

So I think we should probably go with the black and white logo, but... So then I'm thinking someone else might jump in. What would be a better way to say that? Yeah.

And that's okay. I think what we're saying here is in the moment, in the meeting, that's okay. That's normal. We want that. We want that back and forth.

But someone later has to say, okay, we've decided to proceed with the black and white logo. Because X, Y, Z, the contract contrast is eye-catching. I think what we're saying here is we're not all going to talk like robots from the beginning.

There's going to be that human exchange, people cutting each other off and questioning, wondering, kind of incomplete sentences and ideas. But someone has to summarize and be clear at the end. Yeah. Absolutely.

Which leads us to our final point. You always want to end with a verbal recap, right? Take a minute or two at the end to summarize the outcome. You know, you might just say, let's confirm the three decisions we've made before we wrap up.

And this is going to be really vital for that note taker to let people know who is in charge, what, what are our dates, all of the most important information. Love it. All right. So Aubrey, let's remind our listeners what the next step is that they could take.

I mean, things have changed even just in the last couple of years, right? Now we need to not only be clear for people, but also for the AI. How do you feel about that, Aubrey? What are your thoughts?

Yeah, it's so true. Yeah, this is because these are tools that we could take advantage of to save time, to make our workday easier. But a lot of us are just ignoring them because we're not sure exactly how to maximize it, right? So

Our business English course has an entire module on phone and video calls, how to be clear in these calls. This is an added piece. How can we use tools like these AI note takers to save us some time? Yeah, super interesting.

So guys, go on over and join the Business English course. Again, you can save up to $100, but this ends on Sunday, November 1st at midnight US time. And Ambri, remind our listeners, I mean, when you join, you already get live Open Conversation Club once or twice a week. You get fluency parties, but now what are we offering to kick off

the study plan. We're doing a free live kickoff workshop to get you focused, get you connected with the community. So we're very excited to meet all of our new students. When you join here, you go to allersenglish.com slash business to sign up and you go to attend that live kickoff.

All right. Sounds good. Looking forward to seeing you guys inside that course very soon. And Aubrey, I'll talk to you soon. You have a good rest of your day.

All right. Awesome. See you later. Bye. Thank you for listening to Business English, a podcast just for you, the high achieving global professional. Want more from All Ears English?

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