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7 Best ChatGPT Prompts to Summarize Meetings

Discover 7 simple ChatGPT prompts for enhanced AI meeting notes: summaries, action items, and focus.

By
Daniel Htut

Taking detailed, accurate meeting notes is crucial for productivity and alignment across teams and organizations. However, it can be challenging to fully capture important discussions, decisions, and action items while remaining engaged in the meeting itself. This is where ChatGPT can provide invaluable assistance.

With the right prompts, ChatGPT can become an AI-powered note taker for your meetings. It can quickly summarize key points, highlight action items, and generate meeting minutes to share with attendees. This frees you up to focus on participating in the conversation and dynamics of the meeting, without worrying about capturing every detail.

The benefits of using ChatGPT for meeting notes include:

  • Comprehensive documentation of the meeting's agenda, discussions, and outcomes
  • Increased alignment from having a single, shared record of the meeting
  • Accountability around assigned actions and ownership
  • Searchable record of past meeting notes to reference later
  • Reduced notetaking workload compared to manual methods

In this guide, we'll explore the top 7 prompts for ChatGPT to get the most helpful meeting notes. With ChatGPT's note-taking superpowers, you can have more engaging meetings and stay razor focused on execution and follow-through.

Prompt #1: Summarize Key Points

One of the most useful prompts for better meeting notes is to ask ChatGPT to summarize the key points and decisions from a meeting discussion. Here's an example prompt:

Please identify the main discussion points, decisions, and action items from my meeting notes below and provide a concise bulleted summary:

[insert your own meeting notes here]

This prompt instructs ChatGPT to extract only the most essential information from your notes, ignoring any tangents or unimportant details. It asks ChatGPT to summarize and condense the key takeaways into a bulleted list format.

The benefits of this prompt are:

  • It forces ChatGPT to focus only on the pivotal points, filtering out noise.
  • You end up with a condensed summary you can refer to later.
  • The bulleted format makes the key takeaways easy to scan.
  • It saves you time from having to summarize long notes yourself.

So if you want ChatGPT to boil down the essence of a meeting into an executive summary, this prompt delivers. The summarization focuses only on the core discussion highlights.

Prompt #2: Highlight Action Items

One of the most useful applications of ChatGPT for meetings is having it automatically pull out any action items or follow-up tasks from the conversation. This saves you time from having to comb through your notes after the fact to identify next steps.

To do this, simply prompt ChatGPT with something like:

Please list all action items and follow-up tasks from my last meeting with [person or group]. Format them as a bullet point list.

ChatGPT will scan the context of your meeting notes and pull out any sentences related to assignments, deadlines, or tasks. It will condense these down into a handy bulleted list.

For example, if your meeting notes contained sentences like:

"John will send the sales deck to the team by EOD today."

"Sarah offered to research pricing options and report back next week."

"We agreed to reconvene in a month to re-evaluate the product roadmap."

ChatGPT would identify these as action items and generate something like:

  • John to send sales deck to team by EOD today
  • Sarah to research pricing options and report back next week
  • Reconvene in one month to discuss product roadmap

This allows you to quickly review the key follow-ups and to-do's from each meeting in a simple format. It saves you from having to parse through paragraphs of notes just to extract the critical tasks.

Prompt #3: Generate Q&A

Use ChatGPT to create potential questions and answers based on the meeting. This can be helpful to generate FAQs, anticipate questions from stakeholders, or simply clarify information discussed. To do this, simply prompt ChatGPT with something like:

Format this meeting transcript into a Q&A Format.

For example:

Q: What were the key decisions made in the meeting?

A: The main decisions made were to move forward with Project X by the end of Q2, hire 2 new team members to support Project X, and delay Project Y until more research can be done.

Q: What are the next steps for Project X?

A: The next steps are to finalize the Project X plan by 3/15, begin recruiting for the new roles, and reach out to vendors to get quotes for materials. The goal is to launch Project X by 6/30.

Q: When will we have more clarity on Project Y?

A: We are aiming to conduct more research and data analysis over the next 2 months. We should reconvene by 5/1 to decide whether to proceed with Project Y or not.

By generating a list of potential questions and answers, you can ensure all key information is captured and easily accessible after the meeting.

Prompt #4: Create Meeting Minutes

Ask ChatGPT to write concise minutes covering the key outcomes. Format your writing in markdown:

Write concise meeting minutes in markdown format summarizing the key outcomes and action items from my discussion with [name] about [topic]

ChatGPT will generate professionally formatted minutes with headings, lists, and Markdown formatting. This makes it easy to copy and paste the minutes into tools like Notion, Slack, or email.

For example:

Meeting Minutes

Attendees

  • John Smith
  • Mary Johnson
  • Bill Williams

Agenda

  • Project update
  • Budget review
  • Hiring plans

Key Outcomes

  • Hiring freeze lifted, can proceed with 3 new hires
  • Project is on track for completion by end of Q2
  • Budget is on target, no adjustments needed

Action Items

  • John to finalize job descriptions for new roles by Friday
  • Mary to send budget forecast to the team by Monday
  • Bill to schedule project update meeting for next week

Asking ChatGPT to write minutes in Markdown makes it efficient to capture meeting outcomes. The formatted list of attendees, agenda, outcomes, and action items covers the key details you need to share after an effective meeting.

Get Meeting Notes Instantly with Glyph AI

Glyph allows you to record your meetings and get a transcript instantly along with an AI-generated summary.  And the best part is you don’t even need a prompt. Glyph built in summary builder lets you decide from any template and instantly get follow up tasks, key points, and more.

Prompt #5: Send Follow-Up Emails

One of the most useful applications of ChatGPT for meetings is having it automatically generate follow-up emails after the meeting ends. Instead of you having to comb through your notes and draft recap emails yourself, you can simply tell ChatGPT who the email should be addressed to, the purpose of the email, and have it write up a professional summary email recapping the key details.

For example, you could prompt:

"Write a follow-up email to meeting attendees John, Sarah, and Mike that summarizes the key decisions made about the marketing campaign timeline and reminds them of the tasks they committed to for next week's meeting. Use a professional tone."

ChatGPT will then generate a polished email recap touching on the main discussion points, decisions, and action items from the meeting in a professional way.

Having ChatGPT automatically draft follow-up emails for you saves a tremendous amount of time and ensures key details aren't lost or forgotten. It's a great way to increase meeting productivity and accountability.

Prompt #6: Extract Essential Info

Tell ChatGPT to list only the most vital info from lengthy meetings. This helps you quickly capture key insights without getting bogged down in excessive details.

For example:

"Please extract only the essential information and decisions from this meeting: [insert meeting transcript]"

ChatGPT will analyze the meeting text and return a concise bullet point summary of the core points.

You can also ask it to highlight important quotes or key statistics from meetings. This allows you to easily reference the most crucial parts later.

Overall, prompting ChatGPT to extract essentials is an excellent way to simplify unwieldy meetings into condensed overviews. It saves you from having to comb through pages of notes and lets you focus on what truly matters.

Prompt #7: Translate Into Bullet Points

ChatGPT can quickly turn your detailed meeting notes into concise bullet points, perfect for sharing meeting summaries or creating simple to-do lists.

To use this, simply paste your full notes and ask ChatGPT to "convert this into bullet points summarizing the key information."

For example:

Here are my detailed meeting notes:

The purpose of today's meeting was to discuss plans for our upcoming product launch in Q2. We reviewed the launch timeline and deliverables. The launch date is set for April 15. John is managing the marketing materials - they will be finalized by March 15. Jane is in charge of product training and will have the materials ready by April 1. Bob is handling the logistics for the launch event on April 10. We still need to finalize pricing by March 1. Our next meeting about the launch is in 2 weeks.
Convert this into bullet points summarizing the key information.

And ChatGPT would respond:

  • Launch date is April 15
  • John finalizing marketing materials by March 15
  • Jane completing product training materials by April 1
  • Bob handling event logistics for April 10 launch
  • Pricing to be finalized by March 1
  • Next launch meeting in 2 weeks

This allows you to easily extract and share just the critical details from your detailed notes in a clean bulleted format. It's a great way to summarize key points after meetings or synthesize research notes.

Tips for Effective Prompts

When crafting prompts for ChatGPT to summarize meetings and generate notes, keep these tips in mind:

  • Be specific - The more details you provide in your prompt about the meeting context, purpose, attendees, agenda, and discussions, the better ChatGPT can understand what you need and tailor the response appropriately. Clearly state if you want highlights, minutes, follow-ups, etc.
  • Provide context - Give ChatGPT background on the meeting purpose, project, organization, and relationship between attendees to allow generating notes that make sense. For example, "Summarize a 30-minute project status update meeting between me, my manager, and two team members."
  • Guide the tone/style - Specify the desired tone and style for the generated text. Meeting notes for internal use often differ from formal minutes sent to external stakeholders. You may want highlights, concise bullet points, complete sentences, or a conversational summary.
  • Set realistic expectations - Understand ChatGPT's capabilities and limitations. While advanced, it cannot perfectly recall intricate details and conversations from a meeting without actual transcripts/recordings. Focus prompts on summarizing key info.
  • Refine and edit - Review ChatGPT's initial meeting notes and refine or edit as needed to correct any errors, fill gaps, or tweak the tone and formatting. Consider generalizing prompts then customizing.

Providing clear, detailed prompts will allow ChatGPT to produce more accurate, useful meeting notes. Refine your approach with experience interacting with the AI.

Conclusion

ChatGPT is an incredibly useful tool for taking better meeting notes. By using targeted prompts, you can have it summarize key points, highlight action items, generate Q&A, and much more. The AI can extract the most essential information from meetings and translate it into concise bullet points for easy review.

The main benefits of using ChatGPT for meeting notes are saving time, boosting productivity, and having access to perfectly organized notes. You don't have to worry about missing or misinterpreting anything important. And you can collaborate seamlessly by sharing the AI-generated notes with other attendees.

Overall, leveraging ChatGPT's advanced language capabilities will enable you to focus on the meeting discussion instead of scrambling to take notes. Your notes will become smarter, more comprehensive, and more shareable. The AI assistant will free up mental bandwidth so you can fully participate and engage in each meeting. Taking great notes consistently will ensure key insights, decisions, and tasks never slip through the cracks again.

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