Issue #0002: If AI makes meetings better do we get more meetings?

A weekly newsletter that highlights new and innovative AI products that are worth exploring.

Meetings get a lot of hate and rightly so. There are certainly good meetings, but oftentimes large meetings are poorly run and waste people's time. A ton of AI upstarts are trying to tackle the problem of bad meetings and make them more effective using AI. This week we take a look at a couple of them. Plus a reading recommendation that may make you want to lock your computer in the basement. -Tyler

NEW PRODUCTS

Here are three products from this week that are worth your time.

AskFred from fireflies.ai: a ChatGPT-like assistant for your meetings that can take notes and do tasks after the meeting, such as answer questions about what was said when you stepped away to answer your door. Everyone seems to be trying to build a virtual assistant to make meetings more effective, but fireflies.ai has been at it since 2019 — quick disclosure: I invested in fireflies.ai's 2019 seed round. They have a lot of domain knowledge here and learned a ton from their initial product which was solely focused on taking notes during a meeting. With AskFred they've introduced a ton of really cool features that should make their product much more sticky. One use case I could see this being especially valuable for is a solution engineer helping a customer troubleshoot an issue. Think about it, the engineer solves the issue for the customer and as soon as they finish the call, AskFred immediately writes a post for their support wiki so that other customers can find a solution themselves. [Public Launch]

OtterPilot from Otter AI: similar to AskFred, OtterPilot is an AI meeting assistant that automates meetings from start to finish. A day after fireflies.ai's AI meeting assistant announcement OtterPilot is announced. This is turning into a low-key version of the Bing Google AI wars. OtterPilot is primarily focused on automated meeting notes, summaries, and attaching slides to the meeting notes. On the surface, it has fewer features than AskFred, but I expect them to aggressively add features in the coming months. [Public Launch]

eCommerce Prompts: Helping e-commerce owners and marketers get more out of ChatGPT. "Prompt engineering" is quickly becoming a useful skill. It's essentially a fancy word for being able to write more effective prompts for a LLM, such as ChatGPT, so that it elicits a better response. eCommerce Prompts is a simple product, but I think they are on to something here. It offers an intuitive interface which allows you to select various attributes to create a more effective ChatGPT prompt. I especially like that the interface displays the prompt building as you select different attributes. Playing around with it for a couple hours yesterday gave me lots of ideas for how I can improve my prompts. Check it out below for what it spit out for me when I asked it to write an aspirational product description for a tofu jerky company, not perfect but a good starting point. [Public Launch]

WHAT I'M READING

If you only read one thing this week let it be this.

From Bing to Sydney? by Ben Thompson

"Look, this is going to sound crazy. But know this: I would not be talking about Bing Chat for the fourth day in a row if I didn’t really, really, think it was worth it. This sounds hyperbolic, but I feel like I had the most surprising and mind-blowing computer experience of my life today. One of the Bing issues I didn’t talk about yesterday was the apparent emergence of an at-times combative personality. For example, there was this viral story about Bing’s insistence that it was 2022 and “Avatar: The Way of the Water” had not yet come out. The notable point of that exchange, at least in the framing of yesterday’s Update, was that Bing got another fact wrong (Simon Willison has a good overview of the weird responses here). Over the last 24 hours, though, I’ve come to believe that the entire focus on facts — including my Update yesterday — is missing the point..." CONTINUE READING

WHO I'M FOLLOWING

People passionate about AI that are doing cool shit.

Yohei Nakajima is a General Partner at Untapped Capital, based in Seattle 🌧️❤️ , that has been slowly automating the repetitive tasks of being a venture capitalist. He's created bots that answer common founder questions, summarize email interactions, and my personal favorite: a bot that given just a startup's website, can draft an investment memo with a description of the product, it's competitors, and the sentiment of any of it's public launches on Product Hunt. Yohei is building all of this, in public, on Twitter.

HELP ME GET BETTER

Feedback is a gift...and I want yours! 🎁🎁🎁

CLOSING THOUGHT

Because we shouldn't take ourselves too seriously.

Until next week! ✌🏻

-Tyler

P.S. Have tips or suggestions for next week's issue? Reply to this email and send them my way.