Turn Meeting Notes into Tasks Without Making Up Commitments

“Alex might ask the supplier” becomes “Alex will order parts by Tuesday.” The summary sounds decisive. It is also wrong. A meeting assistant earns its place by making commitments easier to check, not by making every conversation sound settled.

Separate three kinds of information Decisions: what the group explicitly agreed. Actions: work someone explicitly accepted. Open questions: matters still unresolved. For actions, record task, owner, due date, and supporting words from the notes. If a field was not agreed, say so. Our handoff guide explains why assigned work and accepted work are different.

Compare the source with the output Fictional notes: “Keep the oak finish. Alex will ask the supplier about hinge stock by Thursday. We might fit everything next week.” Decision: keep the oak finish. Action: Alex to ask about hinge stock by Thursday. Open question: installation date not agreed. Do not create an installation task with a made-up deadline. If timing affects a customer, use the booking process before calling it confirmed.

Copy this extraction prompt “List explicit decisions, accepted actions, and open questions separately. For each action, include the owner, deadline, and supporting phrase exactly as stated. Write ‘Not agreed’ for missing fields. Do not convert tentative language into a commitment.” Use OpenAI’s prompting guide for refinements, and test the output on notes containing both definite and tentative language.

Review before importing tasks Let participants correct the action list. Record the approved version using your approval process. For Google documents, version history can help track edits, but it is not a substitute for explicit agreement. Give each approved action its own reference tied to the meeting. Reprocessing the notes should not create another task. Our debugging walkthrough helps trace a duplicate to its first wrong step. Use only recordings or transcripts you are authorized to process. Practice with fictional notes; consult the FTC’s data-protection guidance before introducing real meeting material into a new service.

Make the result useful after the meeting Put confirmed actions in the weekly update, leaving unresolved items visibly unresolved. If the same review steps recur, document them as an operating procedure. Your test is not whether the summary sounds professional. It is whether each person can point to the source of the work they have actually agreed to do.