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?
- Use Smart Summary for offline meetings
- 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. 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.
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. 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.
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. 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.
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.
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.
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!