What Meeting Analysis Extracts
When your project type is set to Meeting, Smart Notes generation shifts from academic analysis to business-focused extraction. Instead of identifying parts and themes like it does for lectures, the AI focuses on the three elements that matter most after any meeting: tasks that need to be done, decisions that were made, and questions that remain open.
This distinction matters because meetings and lectures contain fundamentally different types of valuable information. A lecture delivers knowledge that needs to be understood and retained. A meeting produces commitments and agreements that need to be acted on. The Meeting analysis mode is optimized to find and structure exactly these actionable elements.
The AI reads through your entire meeting transcript and identifies every instance where someone committed to doing something, where the group reached a conclusion, or where a question was raised but not resolved. Each extracted item includes context from the surrounding discussion — not just the statement itself, but the reasoning and conversation that led to it. Make sure your project type is set correctly before generating; see Project Types for how to configure this.
Tasks
Tasks are the most actionable output of meeting analysis. The AI identifies every commitment, assignment, or action item mentioned during the meeting and structures each one with several key attributes:
- Task description — a clear, concise statement of what needs to be done, rephrased from conversational speech into actionable language
- Assignee — the person responsible for the task, extracted from the conversation context ("Sarah, can you handle the client presentation?" becomes Sarah as the assignee)
- Priority — inferred from discussion urgency, deadlines mentioned, and emphasis in the conversation. Tasks with explicit deadlines or words like "critical" and "urgent" receive higher priority.
- Context — a brief excerpt from the surrounding discussion explaining why this task exists and what constraints or requirements were mentioned
- Timestamp — the moment in the recording where this task was discussed, so you can tap to hear the original conversation
The AI distinguishes between explicit task assignments ("John will prepare the budget by Friday") and implicit commitments ("I think we should probably look into that" — which the AI flags as a potential task with lower confidence). This helps you review the output and confirm which items are firm commitments versus tentative ideas.
After generation, you can edit any task — change the assignee, adjust the priority, rephrase the description, or delete tasks that were mentioned in passing but are not actually actionable.
Decisions
Decisions capture the conclusions your group reached during the meeting. These are moments where discussion converged on an agreement, a choice was made between alternatives, or a direction was set for future work.
Each decision includes:
- Decision statement — what was decided, expressed as a clear declaration
- Impact — who or what is affected by this decision, based on the discussion context
- Alternatives considered — when the discussion included other options that were rejected, the AI notes them for the record
- Timestamp — the moment when the decision was articulated or confirmed
Decisions often emerge gradually in meetings — someone proposes an idea, others discuss it, objections are raised and addressed, and eventually the group reaches consensus. The AI identifies the culminating moment and captures the final decision along with the key reasoning that supported it. This makes decision records valuable not just for knowing what was decided, but for understanding why.
Open Questions
Not everything gets resolved in a meeting. The AI identifies questions that were raised but left unanswered, topics that were deferred to a future discussion, and issues where the group acknowledged uncertainty without reaching a resolution.
Open questions are valuable because they represent the agenda for your next meeting or follow-up conversation. They capture the gaps in your team's knowledge or agreement — the things that still need attention. Each open question includes:
- The question itself — what was asked or what issue was raised
- Context — what prompted the question, who raised it, and any partial answers that were offered
- Related decisions or tasks — connections to other extracted items that depend on this question being resolved
- Timestamp — where in the recording this question came up
Open questions often reveal the most important unfinished business from a meeting. They are the items that might otherwise fall through the cracks — mentioned once, acknowledged as important, but never formally tracked because no one was assigned to resolve them.
Meeting Analysis Workflow
Here is the recommended workflow for getting the most value from meeting analysis:
- Before the meeting — create a project in 12scribe and set the type to Meeting. This ensures the AI uses the correct analysis mode when you generate Smart Notes later.
- During the meeting — record the audio. Optionally, add manual markers at moments that feel important — a critical decision, a heated debate, an assignment you want to remember. These markers will coexist with the AI-generated ones.
- After the meeting — let the transcription complete (or enable auto-transcription to start it automatically), then tap Generate Smart Notes.
- Review the output — go through the extracted tasks, decisions, and open questions. Edit assignees, adjust priorities, delete false positives, and add any items the AI may have missed.
- Share the results — use the share feature to send a link to meeting participants so everyone has the same record of what was decided and assigned.
The entire process from recording to shared meeting minutes typically takes less than 10 minutes of active work — the AI handles the heavy lifting of listening to the entire discussion, identifying actionable items, and organizing them into a structured format. Your role is to review and refine, which is far faster than taking manual meeting notes.
For controlling how thorough the analysis is, adjust the detalization level in your project settings. A Low level captures only the most prominent tasks and decisions. A High level extracts every potential action item and subtle agreement. Learn more about this in the Smart Notes overview.