Saving moments, trimming fat
The nearly overnight advancement of Artificial Intelligence has stirred conversations in nearly every industry, sparking questions like: will AI replace humans in the workplace?
To fully understand the importance and impact of AI on the meetings space, Smart Meetings spoke with Iain McCowan, director of AI at Dubber, to glean some sense of how it can be a helpful tool for planners.
Dubber is a voice recording application that also captures and organizes information. With the use of AI, Dubber captures key moments and insights within an online meeting space.
Our Future with AI
With 25 years of experience in the AI industry, McCowan offers some interesting thoughts on how it’s being perceived by the public and the meetings industry.
“AI should make you better at doing your job, not take your job,” said McCowan. “The big excitement in new AI is that it’s about conversation, its language. That’s what I think is so amazing is that this AI now sounds like a human.”
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Dubber’s ultimate focus is on the important moments in meetings while filtering out the nitty-gritty.
“I guess my hope with AI is that we can get rid of some of the mundane stuff that lives around meetings at the moment and make it more about just humans connecting and having conversations,” McCowen said. “Let [it] do the mundane stuff that we don’t like about meetings.”
The Meetings Cycle
A scheduled meeting doesn’t take place in a vacuum and typically has a designated purpose which is to disseminate or gather information. McCowan refers to “meeting cycles” where there is preparation, an agenda, and a format.
“AI can help different parts of that cycle,” McCowan said, pointing to the current focus of Dubber’s product and goal in preserving moments in time. “What we’re focusing on with Dubber currently are the moments.”
If an action was agreed upon in the meeting and further action needs to be taken, or if there was a disagreement on how something should be dealt with, Dubber’s AI is quietly taking in all these important moments to be addressed after the event.
A Silent, Diligent Partner
Including AI within your online meeting space can offer you a silent, supportive co-partner you never knew you needed.
“AI should be in the background. You should be focused on dealing with people. I think that’s the beauty of the latest technology wave is that our speech to text is as accurate as a human. You can trust that it can be recorded. It can be transcribed as accurately as a person would and now with this latest language technology, you can be confident that you can go back and get the key points or summarize what happened.”
Looking at Language
Language is important in everyday moments but is becomes even more important if meeting planners are utilizing AI to deal with customer service communications. It can be unitized by planners in the form of chatbots to analyze what an attendee is saying and determine what they are trying to communicate.
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“[People] want to know if that customer is not happy with the service we’re providing or we’re not providing a level of service they expect,” McCowan said. “We can transcribe and get the word breakdown, we can break it down into who was speaking, whether it was a staff member or a customer.”
From there, the AI can pinpoint what part of the language used in the conversation made it a complaint, decision, action item, or follow-up.
McCowan notes that they do have AI that looks at voice and can detect changes in a positive or negative tone. “I think it’s going to be exciting to see in the meeting space how people find new ways to improve meetings with this technology.”
