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. We also explain where to find the previous summaries and transcription in the platform.
In this article:
- What is Smart Summary?
- Tips for effective transcription
- How does Smart Summary work?
- Smart summary history
- Use Smart Summary for offline meetings
- 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. Smart Summary is available in the Business plan and allows unlimited amount of transcription hours.
It includes automatic language detection (see here for supported languages) and displays both the transcription and summary in the correct language.
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.
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.
To make sure that you don't forget to start the transcription we will show a reminder. This happens in 2 situations:
- For online meetings when a guest joins the meeting room.
- For offline meetings, 3 minutes after you have joined the meeting room.
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. In offline meetings they will not receive it, since they don't join the Vectera meeting room. We recommend that you ask if it's fine to take AI notes.
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.
Pause and resume transcription
During transcription, you might discuss a topic which you would rather not have in the transcription and summary. In that case you can pause the transcription.
The footer button will show the Paused state as a reminder. Don't forget to click on resume in the Smart summary pane to transcribe the topics you want to include.
Stop transcription and summarise the meeting
Click 'Stop transcription' to end a transcription and automatically create a summary. This may take some time, especially for long meetings. There's a limit of 6 hours, after 6 hours the transcription stops automatically and the summary is being generated.
You will see the summary and the transcription below. You can switch between the summary and transcription via the tabs.
Each transcription has a title, which defaults to the meeting room name and date. You can edit it by clicking on the title, or when you hover over the title an edit icon will appear. We recommend editing this to the type of meeting you had, e.g. "Introduction meeting Company XYZ".
If the Personal notes panel is too small, you can enlarge it using the icon at the top right.
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 the changes 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 be shown as plain text when sharing via email. In your email provider you can re-add the bold and italic layout.
Share your summary
After summarising, there are several ways to share the summary with guests or team members.
-
Click the copy icon to copy the summary for pasting and saving or sending elsewhere. You can also copy the transcription. When you click on Transcription, you will see the same copy icon.
-
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.
- Click the three dots and select Download as PDF to download the summary immediately as a PDF file. You won't be able to use the whiteboard options when you choose this option.
Delete or Start a new transcription
In the Personal notes pane you have the ability to either start a new transcription or to delete the transcription.
To start a new transcription click on + New transcription button. To delete a transcription, click on Delete (and confirm).
-
Start a new transcription: If you click on this button, you will be able to start a new transcription. The previous transcription will be stored in your Smart summary history of the meeting room. You can find this by clicking on the link in the blue banner or at the bottom on the History button.
- Delete a transcription: If you delete a transcription, the transcription and summary will be deleted entirely. Once you do this, there's no way to retrieve them.
Smart summary history
Smart summary history lets you find and revisit all summaries and transcriptions per meeting room. From the meeting rooms overview in your dashboard you can quickly see how many summaries exist per room. On the summaries overview page you can browse, search and open individual summaries. The detail page shows the full summary and transcription, and lets you edit, copy, share, export or delete.
Meeting room
In the Smart Summary pane, click the History button at the bottom to open the smart summary history for that meeting room.
Meeting rooms overview
On the meeting rooms overview page in your dashboard, each meeting room shows the number of saved summaries (e.g. "3 summaries"). Click this link to go directly to the smart summary history for that room.
Summaries overview
The summaries overview lists all summaries for a meeting room, showing the title and date of each. Use the search bar to find a specific summary, or use pagination to browse through older ones. If there is only one summary, you will go directly to the detail page.
Detail page
The detail page shows the full summary and transcription in clickable fields. You will find the summary above the transcription. At the top of the page you can edit the transcription title which is in sync with the title in the meeting room, or delete the summary/transcription. In the summary field you can edit, copy, share, and export the summary. Below you will find the full transcription. You can search within the transcription to find a specific part of the conversation.
Use Smart Summary for offline meetings
Can you use the Smart summary during offline meetings? Yes, you can on desktop and on mobile!
Open a Vectera meeting room, activate a microphone and start transcribing. Just make sure that the audio is well recorded, so talk loudly and clearly!
We even created a specific button in the dashboard 'Take AI notes' which purely focuses on transcribing during offline meetings. It
- Opens your meeting room (not waiting room first),
- Microphone is activated,
- Smart summary panel is opened.
Smart summary on mobile
Smart summary transcription and summaries work in the same way as on desktop.
- Go to a meeting room with your microphone active
- Start transcription
- Find your transcription and summary
- Edit, copy, share or delete the summary *
* Only download as whiteboard doesn't work on mobile. But you can download the summary as a PDF file.
Important! Transcribing on mobile phone has the downside that you might perform actions that influence or stop your transcription. So we recommend to:
- Don't lock your phone during transcription
- Don't accept phone calls during a transcription. On IOS your microphone won't work in the meeting room anymore.
Rest mode
During an offline meeting it might happen that you have a conversation for a long time without touching your computer/phone. In that case your computer/phone might go into rest mode. But in most cases not when you're transcribing:
- Vectera meeting room: When you keep the Vectera meeting room open during transcription, the computer/phone won't go into rest mode.
- Other tab:
- If during transcribing you open another tab and return to the Vectera meeting room, it won't go into rest mode.
- If during transcribing you open another tab and don't touch the computer for a while it will go into rest mode, but transcription will continue.
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!