Everyone hates meetings. They take up a lot of time and in many cases it’s not entirely clear that at the end of them anything has actually been accomplished. Everyone has different notes and action items and usually there’s no centralized place for a record of what transpired.
There’s gotta be a better way.
All of that is what Gridspace hopes to change. The startup has created an application based on technology that automatically saves and indexes meeting conversations. But the big breakthrough is that, though the magic of machine learning and natural language processing, it can determine which parts of the meeting conversations were most important.
I got a demo of the technology at work, with Gridspace CEO Evan Macmillan showing off a beta version of the company’s app for our presentation. With the app open, he walked me through the basics, occasionally telling the app to “remember” certain interesting aspects.
When it was all said and done, the app automatically did the work of picking out all the salient points and highlights of our discussion and listing them on a separate meeting dashboard. For groups, that dashboard would be available to anyone who attended a meeting.
In addition to recording the voices of all meeting participants, the app also captures all supporting documents in the conversation.
By recording and indexing meetings, the app can keep everyone on the same page and make sure that key facts and action items are highlighted. Users can also search for specific moments in the conversation and comment on them, or suggest highlights of the meeting.
While the app does this all pretty well today, Gridspace is releasing a hardware device that can be put into a conference room and act as a conduit to the cloud service, called the Memo M1.
It’s looking to charge $49 per month per user for its entry-level service, and to provide unlimited storage and data for $79 a month. It’s taking pre-orders, and looking to make the M1 available for free as part of a subscription for the app and cloud service.