This help article tells you all about the Smart Summary functionality in Vectera. Smart Summary automatically takes notes and creates summaries of your meetings, reducing manual work and allowing you to stay focused on the conversation.
You can read here how to start a transcription, how to notify other participants, and how to edit and share the summary. You’ll also find information about tracking free hours used and allowing additional hours for Smart Summary use.
In this article:
- What is Smart Summary?
- How does Smart Summary work?
- Track Free hours & allow overage hours
- Tips for effective transcription
- Feedback, questions or issues?
What is Smart Summary?
Smart Summary automatically takes notes (transcription) and summarises them, reducing manual work so you can focus on the conversation.
It includes automatic language detection (see here for supported languages) and displays both the transcription and summary in the correct language.
How does Smart Summary work?
Start transcription
In your meeting room, start transcription by opening Personal Notes and clicking ‘Start Transcription’. If you see a microphone in a red circle, transcription is active.
If there’s no active microphone, you cannot start a transcription. Activate your microphone first, then click Start Transcription.
Transcription for other participants
Notification of transcription
When you start a transcription, all other participants receive a notification. If they disagree, they can leave the meeting.
Transcription for other hosts
Team members with Host Rights can also start a transcription. If you have already started one, they will see it in Personal Notes. After you stop the transcription, they can view the summary and transcription.
Invited non-team members with host rights will not see the Smart Summary section.
Transcription for guests
Guests or team members without host rights cannot see Personal Notes and cannot start or view a transcription. You can send them the summary later.
Stop transcription and summarise
Click ‘Stop Transcription’ to end transcription and automatically create a summary. This may take some time, especially for long meetings.
You will see the summary and the transcription below. You can switch between the summary and transcription via the tabs.
If the Personal Notes panel is too small, you can enlarge it using the icon at the top left.
Edit the summary
When the summary is ready, you and other team members with host rights* in the meeting room can click on the Pencil icon to edit the summary.
In edit mode you can:
- Add/remove text in the summary
- Make text Bold or Italic**
- Add ordered and unordered lists
- Add headings.
Save the changes via the green checkmark icon or cancel it via the red X icon.
* If multiple hosts edit the summary at the same time, this will not be taken into account when saving the edited summary. Only the changes of the person saving the edited text will be saved.
** Bold and italic text will show as plain text when sharing via email. In your email provider you can re-add the bold and italic layout.
Share and delete
After summarising, there are several ways to share the summary with guests or team members, or you can delete it if no longer needed.
Sharing the transcription
-
Click the copy icon to copy the summary for pasting and saving or sending elsewhere.
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Click the three dots and select Share via email to paste the summary into an email. If you're see a blank page after clicking this button, please check this help article to fix it.
** Bold and italic text will show as plain text when sharing via email. In your email provider you can re-add the bold and italic layout. - Click the three dots and select Send to AdminPulse to send the summary to your AdminPulse interactions. Make sure that the meeting room is connected to an AdminPulse Relation.
- Click the three dots and select Export to whiteboard to create a new whiteboard containing the summary. You can download this whiteboard to save it locally as a PDF.
Deleting transcription and summary
To delete the summary, click the red bin icon next to 'Smart Summary' and confirm in the pop-up. You can then start a new transcription.
Track free hours & allow overage hours
When you're using the Smart Summary feature for meetings, you will notice that there's a bar tracking the amount of hours you've already used this month. You will have 5 free hours per team member per month. If you've reached the limit, you can Allow overage hours to continue using the functionality.
For a more detailed explanation you can read this help article.
Track free hours
As mentioned above you have 5 free hours per team member per month. You can see how many hours the team has used in:
- meeting rooms - Personal notes pane
- Smart summary overview page
- Team member page*
* On the team member page you can also track the individual usage of team members.
Allow overage hours
If all the free hours are used, you can allow overage to continue using the Smart Summary functionality this month. When a new month starts the overage hours will be billed and both the free hours and overage hours will be reset to zero.
You can activate overage in two locations:
- The meeting room - personal notes pane (only when free hours limit is reached)
- Smart Summary overview page (at any time)
Overage is charged at €1.00 per hour (excl. VAT) and will be billed on the first of each month. The minimum charge is €1.00 (excl. VAT), even if total overage is less than one hour.
Tips for effective transcription
For clear transcription and summary, we recommend to:
- Ensure the microphone is on (even for offline conversations!)
- Speak standard English at a normal pace; dialects can confuse transcription.
- Avoid talking over one another.
- Speak clearly into the microphone. If there’s background noise, enable noise suppression in settings.
- Speak for over a minute before stopping the transcription for accurate language detection.
Feedback, questions or issues?
For feedback, questions, or issues while testing Smart Summary, contact the Vectera team at support@vectera.com.
The Vectera team looks forward to your feedback. Our goal is to continually improve your online meeting experience! Ready to get started? Log in to your account or start your free trial of Vectera!