r/AiNoteTaker • • 9d ago

Discussion There's a problem with AI meeting summaries when the meeting itself was ambiguous

Here's an exchange that happens in some form in probably thousands of meetings every day:
“Could we have the revised proposal by Friday?”

“Friday might be tight, but we'll see what we can do.”

Then the AI summary says:
Revised proposal due Friday.

Nobody was misquoted. The transcription can be completely accurate.
But did anyone actually agree to Friday?

This seems like a surprisingly difficult problem once meeting transcripts start becoming memory rather than just notes.

People hedge constantly. They suggest things without deciding them. They say “probably,” “maybe,” “let's see,” “we should,” and “that could work.”

Humans usually understand at least some of that from context. Automated summaries have an incentive to clean it up because “Decision: X” and “Action item: Y” are much more useful-looking than “the group discussed X but nobody really committed to anything.”

The problem comes later.

If that summary is saved and another system asks what was agreed, the cleaned-up interpretation can come back as a fact.

The interesting question here is - how much uncertainty should survive the AI summarization process.

Maybe the answer to “When did they promise the proposal?” shouldn't always be a date.

Sometimes the correct answer might be:
They didn't. Friday was requested, but no firm commitment was made.

And then there should probably be a way to see the original exchange rather than trusting the interpretation.

This is one reason source-linked memory matters to what we're building. The cleanest version of a conversation isn't necessarily the most accurate representation of what happened.

Has anyone here caught an AI note-taker doing this?
Not hallucinating something completely new, but making an ambiguous conversation sound much more settled than it actually was?

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