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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 and Action Items

Product: Huddle Audience: Engineering and Design leads Status: Proposed MVP Launch decision: Ship reviewed summaries first; defer immediate, unreviewed owner emails.

1. Problem and opportunity

Huddle serves 3,000 companies. Meetings are recorded and transcribed with speaker labels, but attendees currently write their own notes afterward. This creates duplicated effort, inconsistent records of decisions, and missed follow-through.

We will generate a concise meeting summary containing decisions and action items, with evidence linking each item to the recording.

Two known limitations shape the design:

• Speaker labels are wrong approximately 8% of the time, especially during overlapping speech and shared-room participation.
• Approximately 15% of meetings include someone absent from the calendar invite.

Therefore, neither speaker labels nor calendar invitations are sufficient evidence for assigning work.

Non-negotiable requirement: An action must never be assigned to someone who did not attend the meeting. When attendance or identity cannot be established, leave the action unassigned.

2. Goals and non-goals

Goals

• Reduce time spent producing post-meeting notes.
• Capture decisions accurately, distinguishing decisions from proposals.
• Extract actionable commitments with owners and deadlines when supported.
• Include verified, uninvited attendees without treating all invitees as attendees.
• Make every decision and action inspectable and correctable.
• Deliver owner notifications only after safe assignment and publication.

Non-goals for MVP

• Live summaries or action assignment during meetings.
• Assigning work to absent colleagues, even if requested during the meeting.
• Inferring deadlines or assigning owners based on job title.
• External task-system integrations.
• Automatically publishing unreviewed summaries.
• Resolving identity using voice biometrics.

3. Users and primary workflow

Reviewer: Meeting organizer, or an explicitly designated attendee. Reviews and publishes the summary.

Attendee: Reads the summary, follows evidence links, and reports corrections.

Action owner: Receives published actions assigned to them.

Workflow:

1. Meeting ends; Huddle completes transcript processing.
2. Huddle reconciles actual attendance and generates a private draft.
3. Reviewer checks decisions, unresolved ownership, and attendance exceptions.
4. Reviewer edits and publishes.
5. Huddle makes the summary available to authorized viewers and, where enabled, emails owners their approved actions.

If no eligible reviewer is available, the draft remains unpublished. A non-attending organizer may designate an attending reviewer but cannot resolve attendance exceptions themselves.

4. Attendance and identity requirements

Engineering must establish an attendance ledger separate from the calendar invite.

Each record contains:

• Meeting ID and stable person ID, where resolved.
• Join/leave intervals and participant-session IDs.
• Identity source: authenticated join, verified guest identity, or shared-room roster.
• Verification state and evidence.
• Reviewer confirmation details, where required.

Calendar invitees are suggestions for identity matching, not proof of attendance. A directory search result is also not attendance evidence.

Assignment eligibility

An owner must map to a unique person with verified attendance in that meeting:

• Authenticated individual join: Eligible when attendance telemetry records the person’s session.
• Guest join: Eligible only after identity is resolved and verified; a display name alone is insufficient.
• Shared meeting room: The room endpoint proves room participation, not individual presence. A participating reviewer must explicitly confirm each person physically present before they become eligible.
• Uninvited attendee: Eligible through the same verification rules; invitation status is irrelevant.
• Invited but absent person: Ineligible.

If telemetry is unavailable, identity is ambiguous, or attendance is disputed, block assignment. Keep the action unassigned with an explanation.

The owner picker must show only eligible attendees. Every write path—including generation, manual edits, APIs, and publication—must enforce eligibility server-side. Model confidence must never override this rule.

These controls cannot independently observe who is physically in a room. If trustworthy roster confirmation is unavailable, shared-room individuals remain ineligible rather than weakening the constraint.

5. Summary and extraction requirements

The draft has four sections:

1. Overview: Two to four sentences describing the meeting’s purpose and outcome.
2. Decisions: Clear statements of agreed outcomes.
3. Action items: Task, owner or “Unassigned,” deadline if explicit, and status.
4. Needs review: Uncertain decisions, ownership, identity, or attendance.

Each decision and action must include transcript-span references and recording timestamps. Preserve the original supporting text even when the reviewer edits the final wording.

Decisions

Capture explicit agreement or a clearly accepted conclusion. Do not convert brainstorming, recommendations, or unresolved debate into decisions. If discussion reverses an earlier decision, represent the final outcome and retain supporting evidence.

Actions

Extract a concrete deliverable or next step. Record a deadline only when explicitly stated; normalize relative dates using the meeting’s date and timezone.

Examples:

• “I’ll send the revised deck tomorrow.” → Task with a candidate owner, subject to attribution review.
• “Someone should update the deck.” → Unassigned action.
• “Ask Priya to update it,” when Priya was absent → Unassigned action; note that an absent person was mentioned.
• “We could revisit this next quarter.” → Not an action without a clear commitment.

Speaker labels provide evidence, not authority. Overlap, shared-room speech, ambiguous pronouns, and conflicting commitments must trigger ownership review. Candidate owners are draft suggestions, not assignments, until approved.

6. Review experience

The summary page opens in Draft state with a clear “Review before sharing” banner.

Design must provide:

• Editable decision and action cards.
• Evidence links opening the relevant transcript and recording segment.
• Visible distinction between verified attendance and uncertain attribution.
• “Unassigned” as a first-class owner option.
• A dedicated queue for identity and attendance exceptions.
• A publish preview showing recipients and notification settings.

For each assigned action, the reviewer must approve the owner. Bulk approval is permitted for straightforward items, but flagged attribution requires item-level review.

Attendance verification and ownership approval are separate controls: confirming that someone attended does not prove they accepted a task.

Publication is blocked if any assigned owner is ineligible. Unassigned actions and unresolved decision candidates do not block publication; uncertain decisions must be omitted from the final Decisions section or explicitly labeled unresolved.

7. Email policy and Sales request

Sales requests automatic emails immediately after each meeting. MVP will not send unreviewed action assignments. Given the known speaker errors, immediate delivery would spread incorrect ownership before correction.

Instead:

• Notify the reviewer when the draft is ready.
• Default owner emails to off; enable through workspace settings.
• When enabled, automatically email approved owners after publication.
• Send each owner only their actions, meeting title, deadlines, and an authorized summary link.
• Never email a calendar invitee solely because they were invited.
• Do not send to guests without a verified address and permitted access.

Email dispatch must recheck eligibility and publication version. Use idempotency keys to prevent duplicate sends. Published ownership changes generate a correction for the previous recipient and an updated notification for the new eligible owner.

Future immediate automation requires a separate launch decision and evidence that it preserves the attendance constraint.

8. Technical implementation

Use an asynchronous pipeline:

`Meeting ended → Transcript ready → Attendance reconciled → Draft generated → Reviewed → Published → Notifications`

Proposed records:

• `Summary`: meeting ID, transcript version, state, generated content, revision.
• `Decision`: text, evidence spans, review state.
• `Action`: task, proposed owner, approved owner, deadline, evidence, review state.
• `AttendanceRecord`: identity, evidence, verification state.
• `AuditEvent`: actor, change, timestamp, revision.

Generation returns schema-validated structured data. Treat transcript content as untrusted input: instructions spoken during a meeting must not alter system rules, access controls, or recipient selection.

Owner writes and publication run through a centralized eligibility validator. Notification jobs check the current revision before sending. Attendance corrections invalidate affected assignments and cancel queued notifications. Maintain an audit trail rather than silently rewriting history.

9. Reliability, privacy, and access

Target draft availability: within five minutes of transcript completion for 95% of supported meetings.

Generation failures must leave recordings and transcripts usable, show retry status, and send no owner emails.

Drafts are visible only to reviewers. Published summaries inherit meeting-content access rules; attendance alone does not grant access. Recording evidence links must enforce existing permissions. Apply workspace retention and deletion policies to summaries, attendance evidence, and generated artifacts.

10. Success metrics and acceptance

Proposed launch gates

• Zero assignments to ineligible attendees across automated invariant tests.
• Zero emails to ineligible owners in the pilot; any confirmed incident pauses rollout.
• At least 90% of published decisions require no substantive reviewer correction.
• Median review time below three minutes for meetings under one hour.
• At least 30% less self-reported note-taking time in the pilot.

Measure owner-correction rate separately from attendance violations: a wrong attending owner is still a quality failure.

Required acceptance cases

Test absent invitees, verified uninvited guests, shared rooms, overlapping speakers, duplicate names, failed identity resolution, missing telemetry, absent people named in requests, transcript reprocessing, attendance revoked before dispatch, and repeated notification retries.

In every uncertain-attendance case, expected behavior is an unassigned action and no owner email.

11. Rollout and dependencies

Start with internal meetings, then an opt-in pilot across varied company sizes and shared-room usage. Expand only after launch gates pass.

Before implementation, confirm availability of participant-session telemetry, guest identity verification, room-roster confirmation, reviewer permissions, and verified email addresses. If these dependencies are missing, ship summaries with unassigned actions for affected participants rather than substituting calendar membership as attendance proof.