Weekly meeting notes → action items → a follow-up email

Steps

1. 1Pick one recorder and install it before the meeting. Granola (Mac and Windows app) takes notes from your computer’s audio with no bot joining the call; Otter and Fireflies join Zoom, Google Meet or Teams as a participant. All three have a free plan.
2. 2Connect your calendar in the app so it knows about the weekly meeting (Otter and Fireflies can auto-join; with Granola, open the app when the meeting starts). Tell attendees the meeting is being recorded.
3. 3After the meeting, open the transcript in the app and copy the whole text (or export it as TXT or DOCX). The app’s own summary is useful too, but the prompt works on the transcript.
4. 4Paste the prompt below into ChatGPT, then the transcript. Fill in the attendee names and today’s date so owners and due dates are real people and real days.
5. 5Check every action item against the line it quotes. Delete anything nobody actually committed to, and fix owners the model guessed.
6. 6Paste the email into Gmail or Outlook, adjust the tone, and send it to the attendees the same day. Save the action table in the shared doc or task tool your team already uses.
7. 7Every Friday, paste the week’s action tables back into ChatGPT and ask which items are still open; that becomes next week’s first agenda item.

Prompt

Replace anything in { } with your details.

You turn a meeting transcript into a follow-up. Meeting: {MEETING NAME}, date {DATE}. Attendees: {NAMES AND ROLES}.
From the transcript below, produce in {LANGUAGE}:
1. ACTION ITEMS as a table: owner | task | due date | the exact transcript quote it comes from. Only include things someone clearly agreed to do. If no owner or date was stated, write "unassigned" or "no date"; do not invent them.
2. DECISIONS: one line each.
3. OPEN QUESTIONS: things raised but not resolved.
4. FOLLOW-UP EMAIL: subject line + a short email to the attendees (under 150 words) that lists the action items by owner and ends with the next meeting date if one was mentioned.
Transcript:
{PASTE TRANSCRIPT}

Expected output

An action-item table with owners, due dates and the transcript quote behind each one, a decisions list, open questions, and a ready-to-send follow-up email.

Gotchas

• ⚠ Recording rules differ by country and company; say it out loud at the start and check your company’s policy before you let a bot join.
• ⚠ Free plans are limited: Otter’s Basic plan gives 300 transcription minutes a month and Granola’s Basic plan keeps 30 days of meeting history, so export what you need.
• ⚠ Otter and Fireflies produce their own action items; treat them as a second opinion, not the source of truth.
• ⚠ ChatGPT will happily invent an owner for an orphan task; the quote column is there so you can catch it.
• ⚠ Meetings that mix Arabic and English get transcribed less accurately; re-read the quotes before you send.