Solving the Rubik’s Cube of meeting productivity
Consider this a seemingly impossible-to-solve conundrum: The increasing pace of business and expectations for work output has also increased challenges for already-busy professionals. As an additional layer of complexity, many are trying to navigate changing work arrangements (office-first, remote, hybrid, flexible hybrid…and perhaps others that will emerge).
But a revolutionary new solution from voice technology leaders Speech Processing Solutions and Sembly AI offers a game-changing answer.
An admittedly perplexing problem
There are more demands than ever on people’s time and attention, in both public and private sectors, as well as across every industry. The increase in the number of meetings team members must attend (spurred in part due to the COVID-19 pandemic) is a significant contributor to encroaching on employees’ time. For example, recent research from the career-development platform Zippia shows:
- Organizations spend roughly 15% of their time on meeting – but the responses indicate that 71% of those meetings are considered unproductive.
- 24 billion hours are wasted each year as the result of unproductive meetings.
- 65% of employees agree that meetings prevent them from completing their own work, and employees admit to multitasking in at least 41% of meetings.
These statistics are perhaps not surprising given the “Zoom fatigue” and other psychological effects of virtual meetings, as well as being double-booked or on other urgent deadlines that can prevent full attention and engagement. However, the need still does exist for teams to connect and collaborate, assign clear tasks to owners, define deliverables, and drive deadlines to get projects done. Until now, it was a daunting task to reconcile these two realities.
A groundbreaking – but simple – solution
The partnership between Speech Processing Solutions, a leader in speech-to-text technology and Sembly AI, a pioneer in voice AI technology, is truly powerful – as they come together to introduce Philips SmartMeeting, conversational AI-driven meeting technology that not only records multi-speaker meetings, but takes notes, generates summaries, and creates action items.
With the ability to differentiate between speakers, Sembly AI’s revolutionary VoiceID algorithm can track who said what in transcripts, making it easy to manage follow-ups with the right contributor from a meeting. This is complemented by high-performance Philips SmartMeeting hardware that captures both audio and visuals with the highest levels of clarity and accuracy. And of course, no conversation about technology can take place without talking about how it fits in with an organization’s existing technology stack. SmartMeeting integrates with popular virtual meeting tools such as Zoom, Google Meet, Microsoft Teams, and Webex to support a seamless experience within team members’ workflows.
An array of benefits
Increased complexity and impediments to smooth collaboration are cited as two of the biggest challenges in the modern workplace, and these capabilities demonstrate how SmartMeeting is designed to overcome these challenges and support today’s modern workplace culture and hybrid workforce needs.
Gil Makleff, co-founder and chief executive officer, Sembly AI, summarizes SmartMeeting’s value as the “answer to the FOMO factor of a distributed workforce culture and its ability to gain accurate, AI-driven insights without actually being in meetings. Technology supports the goals of many modern companies to democratize data, encourage cross-team collaboration and drive outcomes from meetings in increasingly hybrid or remote environments.”
Dr. Thomas Brauner, CEO of Speech Processing Solutions, adds that the combined strengths of the two companies “enables users to capture all speakers and benefit from a smart assistant. In this way, users effectively address today’s workplace culture and prioritization of information access, while driving actionable outcomes from meetings of any type.”
Ultimately, Philips SmartMeeting helps support collaboration and productivity by allowing team members to attend by proxy and follow-up on concise action points. While it’s impossible to be everywhere all at once, SmartMeeting lets today’s professionals do the next best thing – and never miss the highlights. This new technology is one small but effective way to make navigating this change more seamless as well as help professionals stay competitive in an ever-evolving business landscape.
Get your Philips SmartMeeting devices. Now available at selected retail stores in USA – Staples and Office Depot.