By Jay Shaw and Alan Hewitt
New AI products continue to arrive at a dizzying pace. Some will change the way we think and work while others will promise much but deliver less. Here, Jay Shaw (Praxonomy CEO) and Alan Hewitt (Praxonomy NED) discuss the pros and cons of one of the latest products coming to market.
In the pro camp Jay says:
This August, Limitless, the newly re-named Rewind.ai Silicon Valley tech company, is bringing what looks like a Sci-Fi pendant to market.
The Limitless device will listen in on your meeting conversations and automagically produce transcripts, notes and summaries which you can turn into meeting minutes.
Matthew Berman released a good youtube video on the product. You can find it here.
The main points seem to be that Limitless is:-
- Personal — it’s a cute little wearable device that works along with a phone and/or laptop application and keeps your data encrypted and under your control.
- Cheap — Limitless will cost you a US$99 one-time fee plus a monthly $19 “Pro” subscription fee for “Confidential Cloud” storage so you can access your meeting records from various devices and access a number of coming enhancements (precise details of which have yet to be announced).
- Stylish — it comes in your choice of bright, Apple-like colors.
- Long-lasting — the initial release version will come standard with 100 hours of battery life.
- Production-proven — the company’s predecessor Rewind application does something similar and actually works though it’s a little bit simpler.
- Law-abiding (not to mention polite) — it includes something the company calls Consent Mode, meaning that the Limitless pendant waits for your meeting partners’ permission before it starts recording their voices.
Alan argues that this kind of product may lead to:-
- Perverse consequences — note-taking, especially longhand note-taking, has been shown to focus the mind and increase recall; if Limitless is doing the work, people in the meeting, including the secretary, may just tune out.
- Blind spots — Albert Mehrabian, a body-language researcher, broke down the components of a typical face-to-face conversation as 55% non-verbal, 38% vocal (meaning tone, delivery speed, etc. but not the words used) and only 7% based on words, leaving Limitless potentially blind to 93% of a conversation’s actual meaning.
- Process problems — If the meeting secretary has not been paying rapt attention, as may well become the case, how can he trust the AI’s outputs? AIs morph by design. Today’s summary may differ from yesterday’s and even same-day outputs may differ by device. If everybody is wearing his or her own pendant, will the different devices generate similar outputs? Will they need to trade notes and come to a consensus summary?
Jay responds: of course there’s a lot more to think through and a lot more to come, all of which will happen soon says the company, with “more” to include help with meeting preparation and agents that go out in the world and get things done for you.
Alan’s retort is Caveat Emptor on both the timing of these enhancements and the exact functionalities the developers end up building.
Even if Limitless proves to be a useful product over time, key issues for this year’s users will include the product’s as yet unknown ability to deal with accents, room acoustics and hybrid meetings (meaning with some people around the table and others online), the accuracy of its speech-to-text transcriptions, the semantic sophistication and therefore usefulness of its notes and summaries, and the company’s choice of coming enhancements (for instance, will Limitless be able to read and incorporate meeting agendas into its summaries or take notes in a given house style?).
Jay believes Limitless will prove useful despite concerns. If the pendant works, it will take some of the drudgery and uncertainty out of taking minutes. Questions like — Did I hear that right? Did she or didn’t she say XYZ? Was this an action item or did it become a to-be-discussed-later agenda point? — will be answered quickly because it will be child’s play to check the record.
At the very least, Limitless may prove to be an important back-up resource for company secretaries who want to fact-check their drafts.
Alan responds that if we see the recording of meetings as “drudgery” then there is something fundamentally wrong with how we’re working.
One important consideration is that companies may prefer not to keep records of who said what in which meeting, thinking that meetings should be, by definition, safe spaces where questions, cross talk and concerns are kept confidential and only actionable outcomes are recorded. These companies will want different kinds of functionality, including data-destruction-by-default options built into the product.
There are, as always, at least two sides to every argument about new technologies. You will need to scrutinise each innovation on arrival for its benefit to you and your organisation.
You will need to challenge whether the product can actually do what it claims, add value and make a tangible difference. If so, adopt it at speed and start to realise the benefits as soon as possible.
We will see many, many new AI products over the next few years. Some will enable you to radically change and improve what you do today. Some will look shiny and new but not deliver much in the way of long-term value. Your challenge is to distinguish one from the other.
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Jay Shaw