Meeting Apps Hear, Slipbox Listens and Acts

In today's digital workplace, the rise of AI has transformed how we conduct meetings. While AI promises enhanced productivity, a crucial opportunity emerges: How can we use AI to deepen human engagement in meetings while avoiding the pitfalls of digital note-taking?

Our journey developing Slipbox, an AI-powered note-taking companion, was shaped by insights into effective note-taking practices. Studies have shown that while digital note-taking enables more extensive documentation, there are important distinctions in how notes are taken. As Mueller and Oppenheimer (2014) in their article observed, "Note taking can be generative (e.g., summarizing, paraphrasing, concept mapping) or nongenerative (i.e., verbatim copying). Verbatim note taking has generally been seen to indicate relatively shallow cognitive processing." This insight aligned with our observations of successful professionals who use handwritten notes not merely to record information, but as a tool for active engagement and deeper understanding.

Through interviews with over 100 professionals, we discovered that enhancing engagement isn't about choosing between digital and manual approaches; it's about combining their strengths intelligently. When AI adapts to your knowledge gaps, work style, and areas of interest, it creates opportunities for deeper participation. You can reflect on important points without missing context, connect current discussions with past insights, and focus on what matters most to you.

Designing for Active Engagement

Meet Slipbox, a meeting companion that learns and evolves with you. By combining AI-powered transcription with an adaptive memory system, Slipbox encourages you to capture ideas in your own words while ensuring you don't miss important details. It doesn't just record meetings; it provides contextual cues when you need them, surfaces relevant insights from your past discussions, and helps you engage more meaningfully in every conversation. While other apps simply hear, Slipbox truly listens and acts!

Ask Slipbox: Meeting Chat Assistant

We recognized that people multitask in virtual meetings. Sometimes individuals are fully engaged, other times minds could wander, and often they need to process something that was said a few minutes ago. That is where Ask Slipbox comes in. If you've missed part of the conversation while reflecting on an important point, you can ask Slipbox what happened in the last few minutes. It provides a quick summary that helps you get back on track in the meeting without feeling lost.

Fig 1: Ask Slipbox is a chatbot like interface for the current meeting

The Ask Slipbox feature allows you to query existing meetings, extract key information, and actively engage by catching up on conversations even when tuning in and out, ensuring continuous involvement and understanding.

AI Cues: Contextual Intelligence

Most meeting applications are "one and done"; they don't leverage historical context or understand who individuals are as participants. We have developed AI Cues to address this limitation. It provides relevant cues based on:

• Personal meeting history.
• Current conversation context.
• Web-sourced information that relates to the discussion.
• Meeting preparation context, like pre-read and related documents.

Fig 2: AI Cues provides relevant cues based on the current meeting context

These cues are designed to be concise and non-disruptive, allowing you to quickly absorb relevant information without losing focus on the conversation.

The Smart Note-Taking Editor

We started with a streamlined note-taking editor, but we knew we needed to go further enabling you to capture not just what you hear but also what you see and what's important to you. Our goal was to help you not just log information, but actively engage with other participants during meetings, and even add what you see by taking screenshot assets. These would be part of the overall summary that Slipbox would generate.

Fig 3: The Smart Note-Taking Editor

We believe manual note-taking remains vital. It enables you to actively engage in conversations while also guiding AI to understand what matters most to them.

Bridging Knowledge Gaps

The key ingredient for Slipbox to enable active engagement is understanding the individual. Slipbox runs locally on a laptop and builds an evolving understanding of who the individuals are and what they know. Through a memory system that continuously learns from interactions, the agent creates a rich, personalized knowledge base that grows over time.The feature allows Slipbox to:

• Provide contextually relevant information by comparing topics being discussed against existing knowledge base, automatically filling in gaps with additional explanations where needed.
• Surface pertinent insights from past conversations and work, connecting current discussions with related historical context previously explored or created.
• Maintain an adaptive model of individuals' expertise across different domains, identifying and bridging specific knowledge gaps between what's being discussed and current understanding.
• Deliver truly personalized support by learning working style, common challenges, and areas of interest through ongoing interactions.

Slipbox's adaptive memory system enables us to create a truly personal tool that adapts to a unique way of processing information, helping you make deeper connections and work more effectively.

Final Remarks

We've deliberately designed our system to avoid the "AI will handle everything" trap. The goal isn't to replace human engagement with AI in meetings, but rather to enhance human participation through intelligent assistance. The system acts as a proactive helper, making meetings more accessible and engaging while keeping you firmly in control of your learning and participation. The important thing to remember is that AI should serve as a bridge to better understanding and engagement, not a replacement for active participation. When designed thoughtfully, AI can help us be more present and engaged in our meetings.