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Vibhor Chandel · AI for Professionals

From 20 years of running projects and teams

New videos every Wednesday

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These are the prompts from my video on turning a meeting transcript into meeting notes and action items with ChatGPT. You get the setup, a fill-in template for each step, the exact prompts I used for the Fernhill weekly check-in in the video, and the sample transcript so you can run it yourself.

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Downloads

PromptPack3 - Meeting Notes (PDF)

PromptPack3 - Meeting Notes (PDF)

Fernhill weekly check-in: the sample transcript, in Word and VTT (zip)

Fernhill weekly check-in: the sample transcript, in Word and VTT (zip)

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In this pack

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Before you start

1. Check your company's AI rules before you paste a meeting into any AI tool. Some companies say no to this, and that's their call.
2. Start a new chat for each meeting, and send the prompts in order in that one chat.
3. Replace everything in [square brackets] with your own details. </aside>

🔒 Step 1: Setting up ChatGPT

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Before you paste a transcript into ChatGPT, do two small things first. People often say things in a meeting that they don't expect to be shared.

• Turn off training on your chats. Click your name, then Settings, then Data controls, and turn off "Improve the model for everyone".
• Delete anything private from the transcript before you paste it. That way it never reaches ChatGPT at all, and you're not relying on ChatGPT to leave it out.

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Quick tip. Search your transcript for words like "between us", "off the record" or "don't put this in". It takes about ten seconds. Even better, while you're in the meeting, keep a note of anything someone asks to keep off the record, and the time they said it.

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🎙️ Step 2: Getting the transcript

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Copy your meeting transcript from whichever tool you used to record the meeting.

• On Teams or Google Meet at work, it's usually in the meeting's recap.
• For an in-person meeting, the Voice Memos app on an iPhone can make one for you.
• The free versions of Zoom, Meet and Teams usually don't save a transcript, so you may need your work account for this.

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Quick tip. Keep the times in the transcript when you copy it. The main prompt uses them to show where in the meeting each person agreed to a task.

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📝 Step 3: Writing the main prompt

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This is where the 3W Meeting Notes get built. Every action item gets a who, a when and a where. Start a new chat, paste this prompt, then paste your transcript right under it. It works on any meeting once you put in the date.

Turn this meeting transcript into meeting notes. The meeting was on [day, date].

Use five sections:

1. Meeting details: date, who attended, who was expected but missing.
2. Summary: two or three sentences per agenda item.
3. Decisions: mark each one Decided, Conditional or Parked. If a decision changed during the meeting, give only the final one and say it changed.
4. Action items: a table with Task, Owner, Due date, and the line where the owner agreed to it.
5. Open questions.

Rules:

• Use only what's in the transcript. Don't guess.
• Only name an owner if they said "I'll" or agreed when asked. If not, write "No owner."
• Turn named days like "Wednesday" into dates. For vague ones like "end of next week," write "No date" and keep the words in brackets.
• Leave out anything someone asked to keep out of the notes.
• Keep the notes short enough to read in two minutes.

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Quick tip. Always give it the meeting date, so it can turn "Wednesday" into a real date. And keep the fourth column of the table, the line where the owner agreed. That's the where, and it lets you check any task in a few seconds.

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🔍 Step 4: Finding the mistakes

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Before the notes go to anyone, ask ChatGPT to check its own work against the transcript. This is the mistakes prompt, and it works on any meeting as it is.

Before I send this, check your notes against the transcript. Don't rewrite them yet. List:

1. Action items with no clear owner or date.
2. Any person or company named in two different ways.
3. Anything you assumed or filled in yourself.
4. Decisions that might not be final.
5. Action items in the transcript that are missing from the notes.

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Quick tip. Then do one check yourself. Pick one action item and search the transcript for a few words from its where line. It takes about ten seconds a line, and checking two or three tells you pretty quickly whether you can trust the rest.

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🧩 Step 5: Fixing the gaps

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ChatGPT can't decide who should own a task that nobody took. Ask the person who can make that call, then give ChatGPT all the fixes in one message.

Here are my fixes. [Name] owns [task], due [day, date]. [Name] will [task] by [day, date]. I asked [him or her] after the meeting. Add [name]'s task to [task], by [day, date]. Update the notes.

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Quick tip. Say which fixes you got after the meeting. ChatGPT then marks those tasks "confirmed after the meeting, no transcript line", so anyone reading the notes can see which tasks came from the meeting and which came from you.

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📨 Step 6: Sending the notes

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Two more prompts. The first writes a short email to the team, and the second makes a table you can use to track the tasks.

Write a short follow-up email to everyone at the meeting, and copy [name]. Under 150 words, friendly and plain. Only the decisions and the action items with owners and dates. Say the full notes are attached.

Now give me just the action items as a table I can paste into Excel or Google Sheets: Task, Owner, Due date, Status. Set Status to Not started.

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Quick tip. Keep the email short and attach the full notes for anyone who wants more detail. Then paste the table into a spreadsheet, and that's your tracker for next week's meeting.

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Example

The Fernhill example from the video