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PRD: AI-Generated Meeting Summaries and Action Items

Audience: Engineering and design leads Product: Huddle Status: Draft

1. Summary

Huddle will generate a post-meeting summary that highlights decisions and action items, identifies owners when it can do so reliably, and can email confirmed action items to their owners automatically. This replaces the manual note-taking people do after calls.

The core safety requirement is non-negotiable: an action must never be assigned to someone who did not attend the meeting. Calendar invitations alone cannot establish attendance: some invitees do not join, and around 15% of meetings include someone who was not invited. Speaker labels also cannot establish identity on their own; they are wrong about 8% of the time, especially during interruptions or when several people share a meeting-room connection.

The product must therefore separate three questions: what was decided, what needs to be done, and who—if anyone—can be safely identified as the owner. When attendance or ownership is uncertain, Huddle must leave the action unassigned rather than guess.

2. Problem and goals

Today, attendees write their own notes after meetings. This is inconsistent, takes time, and makes it easy for decisions and follow-ups to be lost.

Goals - Produce a concise, useful summary after a recorded meeting. - Clearly distinguish decisions from discussion, proposals, and unresolved questions. - Extract action items and assign them only to verified meeting attendees. - When enabled, email confirmed action items to their owners shortly after the meeting ends. - Let users correct mistakes and give feedback.

Non-goals for the first release - Replacing full meeting transcripts or recordings. - Creating tasks in external project-management tools. - Inferring deadlines, priorities, or owners that were not stated. - Automatically assigning work when the owner is unclear. - Resolving disagreements about whether a decision was made without review.

3. Users and primary workflow

Users: meeting attendees who need an accurate recap; organizers who want to review or share it; and action owners who need a clear follow-up.

1. A recorded meeting ends. Huddle gathers the transcript, speaker labels, calendar context, and actual session attendance data.
2. Huddle generates a summary with separate Decisions, Action items, and, where useful, Open questions sections.
3. For each action, Huddle identifies the supporting transcript evidence and checks the proposed owner against the verified attendee roster.
4. If automatic action-item email is enabled for the organization, Huddle emails only actions with a sufficiently clear owner whose attendance is verified.
5. The organizer and attendees can view the summary, correct it, and report errors. Unassigned actions remain visible for follow-up but are not emailed as assigned work.

4. Functional requirements

4.1 Establishing who attended

• Use Huddle’s meeting-session join/leave records as the attendance source of truth. The calendar invite is context, not proof that someone attended.
• Include identifiable people who joined without a calendar invitation. Exclude invitees who did not join.
• Represent an attendee using a verified Huddle account, authenticated guest identity, or another approved identity mechanism.
• If a meeting-room device represents several people and Huddle cannot reliably map speakers to individuals, do not treat the device name or a guessed speaker identity as a person. The organizer may confirm identities or owners in the summary UI.
• If reliable session attendance data is unavailable, fail closed: generate the summary, but do not assign or email action items.

4.2 Generating decisions and action items

• Generate a short overview and the three optional sections: Decisions, Action items, and Open questions.
• Include a decision only when the transcript supports an explicit agreement or choice. Label proposals or unresolved discussion as open questions, not decisions.
• Phrase each action as a concrete task. Include a due date only if one was explicitly stated; otherwise show no due date.
• Attach a brief transcript excerpt and timestamp to each decision and action so users can check the source.
• Do not invent missing details. If the task is clear but no owner is, show it as Owner not confirmed. If the task itself is ambiguous, flag it for review rather than present it as certain.

4.3 Assigning owners safely

• Every proposed owner must match a verified person in the actual attendee roster. Enforce this as a backend validation rule, not just a model instruction or UI check.
• A calendar invitee who did not join must never be assigned. A person who joined without an invite may be assigned if their identity and attendance are verified.
• Speaker labels may help identify who volunteered, but must not independently authorize an assignment. When overlap, room audio, or attribution uncertainty makes ownership unclear, leave the action unassigned.
• Users may assign or change an owner in the UI only to a verified attendee. Record the change and its actor in the audit log.
• Recheck the attendance invariant before saving an assignment and immediately before sending an email.

4.4 Automatic emails

• Provide an organization-level setting to enable automatic action-item emails. Once enabled, send an email after generation to each verified owner with at least one confirmed action.
• Do not send an assignment email for an unassigned action or to anyone not verified as having attended. Do not send the full transcript by default.
• Include the meeting title and date, the recipient’s confirmed actions, any explicitly stated due dates, a link to the Huddle summary, and a way to report an incorrect assignment.
• If the meeting has no verified owners, send no owner emails. The organizer may receive a link to the summary according to organization settings.
• Target delivery within five minutes of the meeting ending at the 95th percentile. If generation or identity checks fail, do not send speculative emails; show the organizer that the summary or email is delayed or needs review.
• Provide clear controls to turn automatic emails off. Email delivery status and failures must be visible to the organizer.

5. UX requirements

The summary should make confidence and uncertainty understandable without exposing raw model scores. Show an Owner confirmed state for verified assignments and Owner not confirmed when a person cannot be safely identified. Present source timestamps as links into the recording or transcript, subject to existing access permissions.

Organizers must be able to edit summary text, remove an incorrect item, or assign an unassigned item to a verified attendee. Edits must be saved with a clear indication of who made them. If an action email has already been sent, do not silently replace the original assignment: notify the organizer that the owner changed and offer a corrected email to the new verified owner. Never email the former owner again unless explicitly requested.

The UI should explain that the calendar list may include people who did not attend and that unidentified room participants require confirmation. Use clear empty states when there are no decisions or actions.

6. Data, privacy, and operational requirements

Use only meeting data already available to Huddle for recording, transcription, and attendance, subject to existing recording consent and organization policies. Apply existing access controls to summaries, transcript evidence, and recording links. Store generated summaries, edits, assignment records, email status, and relevant audit events under Huddle’s existing retention and deletion policies. Do not use action-item content to train models unless the organization’s existing data policy explicitly permits it.

Generation and email must be idempotent: retries must not create duplicate summary items or send duplicate emails. Log the evidence reference, proposed owner, roster-validation result, any human correction, and delivery outcome for troubleshooting and audit.

7. Acceptance criteria

The release is acceptable only if: 1. A calendar invitee who did not join is never assigned or emailed an action. 2. An identifiable, authenticated attendee who joined without an invite can be assigned when the transcript supports the assignment. 3. An unclear speaker in overlapping audio produces an unassigned action, not a guessed owner. 4. A shared-room connection with no reliable person mapping cannot result in an individual assignment without organizer confirmation. 5. Every emailed action has a verified attendee owner and a link to its supporting summary. 6. Email retries do not result in duplicate messages. 7. Users can correct an assignment, and the correction is restricted to verified attendees.

8. Success metrics and rollout

Track summary generation success, time to summary, owner-confirmation rate, action-item correction and removal rates, email delivery time, duplicate-email rate, and user feedback. The primary safety metric is the number of assignments or assignment emails to non-attendees; the target is zero. Also monitor missed or unassigned owners to understand the trade-off between safety and usefulness.

Roll out behind an organization-level feature flag. Start with internal meetings, then a small customer cohort. Review false assignments and user corrections before expanding. Do not broaden automatic-email availability until attendance validation, idempotency, and failure handling pass the acceptance criteria.

9. Dependency to resolve before implementation

Engineering must confirm that Huddle can provide reliable, person-level join/leave records, including authenticated guests and shared-room behavior. If that data is unavailable or insufficient for a meeting, the safe behavior is to generate the summary without assigning or emailing owners.

PRD: AI Meeting Summaries — Decisions & Action Items

Sep 24, 2026 · @Martin Slaney

Summary

We will generate a summary after every recorded Huddle meeting that lists the decisions made and the action items, each with an owner who was verifiably in the meeting. The organizer reviews the summary and sends it in one click; nothing is emailed without that step in v1.

Problem. Today attendees write their own notes after the call. Notes are inconsistent, often missing, and action items lose their owners within a day. We already have what we need to fix this: a recording, a transcript with speaker labels, and the calendar attendee list.

Why this is not trivial. Two of those inputs are unreliable. Speaker labels are wrong about 8% of the time, mostly during crosstalk and when several people share a meeting-room device. About 15% of meetings include someone who joined without a calendar invite. A naive build would misassign owners often enough to lose trust in the first week.

Goals and metrics

The goal is summaries people send without rewriting, with zero actions assigned to non-attendees.

Goals

• Replace manual post-meeting notes for recorded meetings.
• Every action item has a correct owner or is explicitly marked unassigned.
• Get action items to owners within minutes of the meeting ending.

Non-goals (v1)

• Pushing tasks into Jira, Asana or Linear.
• Summaries for unrecorded meetings or live, in-call summaries.
• Improving diarization itself. We design around the 8% error rate, not fix it.

Success metrics

Owner precision is measured from organizer edits plus a weekly labelled sample of 200 meetings.

Users and core flow

The organizer owns the summary; attendees receive it.

• Organizer: reviews, fixes owners, sends. Usually the calendar invite's creator; can hand off to any attendee.
• Action owner: receives their items by email and in the app.
• Other attendees: receive the full summary once sent.

```mermaid flowchart LR A[Meeting ends] --> B[Transcript +<br/>join log ready] B --> C[Build verified<br/>roster] C --> D[Extract decisions<br/>and actions] D --> E[Roster filter +<br/>confidence check] E --> F[Organizer review] F --> G[Send to owners<br/>and attendees] ```

The roster filter runs as deterministic code after the model, never inside the prompt alone.² Target: summary ready for review within 5 minutes of meeting end for meetings up to 90 minutes.

Requirements

An owner can only be chosen from the verified roster: people who actually joined, not people who were invited.

Verified roster

1. R1. Build the roster from the join log, not the calendar invite.¹ Invited people who never joined are excluded. 2. R2. Each roster entry has an identity tier: - Verified: joined signed in to a Huddle account, or by a dial-in matched to a known number. - Guest: joined with a display name only (most of the 15% uninvited joiners). - Room: a meeting-room device; people behind it are unknown individuals. 3. R3. Match uninvited joiners to workspace accounts by signed-in account only. Never match on display name alone.

Summary content

1. R4. Decisions: a short statement of each decision, with a transcript timestamp link. No owner field.
2. R5. Action items: task, owner (or "Unassigned"), due date if said aloud, timestamp link, and confidence.
3. R6. Every item links to its evidence in the transcript so reviewers can check it in one click.

Assignment rules

1. R7. The model returns a proposed owner per item. Code then checks it against the roster. Any owner not on the roster is replaced with "Unassigned", and the named person is shown as a mention ("mentions: Dave, not in meeting").
2. R8. Owner comes from content first: a named request ("Priya, can you…") beats the speaker label of "I'll do it".
3. R9. Mark an owner low confidence when the evidence depends on a speaker label in an overlapping segment, a Room entry, or a Guest entry.
4. R10. Low-confidence items show as "Suggested: Priya" and need organizer confirmation before any email goes out.
5. R11. Room and Guest entries cannot receive email. The organizer can reassign to a verified person or leave it unassigned.
6. R12. Log every model proposal, filter result and organizer edit. This is our precision measurement.

Handling the known limits

Both limits hit ownership, not decisions, so we contain them at the owner step.

The error compounds per meeting. If each item's owner is wrong 8% of the time, a meeting with 5 action items has a 34% chance of at least one wrong owner (1 − 0.92⁵). That is why confirmation sits before email, not after.

Sales request: auto-email on meeting end

Decision: not in v1 as requested. We ship one-click organizer send now, and gated auto-send in phase 2 once measured precision earns it.

Why not now. An email to the wrong owner is the most visible failure this feature can have. With the error rate above, roughly a third of 5-item meetings would email someone a task that isn't theirs. With external guests, it may land outside the customer's company. Early trust is hard to win back.

What Sales gets instead.

• v1: the organizer gets a "Summary ready" notification within 5 minutes and sends with one click. Goal: sent within 30 minutes (see metrics).
• Phase 2: a workspace setting to auto-send at meeting end, but only items that are high confidence and owned by a Verified attendee. Everything else still waits for the organizer. It ships only when owner precision on high-confidence items is ≥ 97% for 4 consecutive weeks.
• Auto-send never emails Guest or Room entries, or anyone outside the customer's domain, unless an admin enables it.

Design notes

The review screen must make checking owners faster than writing notes.

• Decisions first, then action items grouped by owner, then Unassigned.
• Low-confidence owners look visibly different ("Suggested") and are editable inline from a roster picker, never free text.
• Each item plays its transcript clip on click.
• The Send button states who gets email: "Send to 4 owners and 7 attendees".
• Empty state: if no decisions or actions are found, say so plainly rather than inventing any.

Rollout

Open questions

• [ ] Is the join log's signed-in identity reliable enough to call "Verified"? Engineering to confirm.
• [ ] Who organizes when the invite creator didn't attend? Proposed: first Verified attendee from the invite.
• [ ] Do customers need to disable summaries per meeting for sensitive calls? Legal and Sales to confirm.
• [ ] Retention: how long do we keep drafts and the evidence log?