3 reasons why building a no code meeting bot is a bad idea

The Hype Around Meeting Bots

There's a lot of hype at the moment about meeting bots. Meeting bots can do some really cool things and there are a lot of services out there that provide meeting bots, but basically they will join a meeting, whether that's in Zooms, Microsoft Teams, Google Meet, and working with a transcription and working with a video recording now provides a summary analytics data on the meeting. Just to highlight a couple that I've come across, 'cause if you're like me and you spend a lot of time on video calls, it's not long before someone's meeting bot joins before them and invites themself into the meeting. So there's like author.ai, there's fireflies.ai, and there's some really cool and creative things going on. And let's not forget too that there's a history of very hot acquisitions. For example, Vow was acquired by Zapier.

Three Reasons Against Building a Meeting Bot

Yeah, meeting bots are really hot, but here's three reasons why I would advise not building a meeting bot, and then one reason why I would advise it.

Number one is I think that they're ugly. I don't like the idea of, I don't like it when I, yeah, this is a personal preference, but I don't like joining a meeting or being part of a meeting where there's just, if there's only me and one other person, that I lose a third of the real estate. And yes, I mean in Zoom, I think certainly you can hide it, but it kind of just means it takes a space, and that's fine when I'm recording videos here, I've got quite a big monitor, but if I'm on a call and I'm on my laptop, I've only got a 13-inch MacBook, that, you know, a third of the screen real estate to just have a black box there, I just think it is bad for the meeting. It kind of, you know, it's just like someone wearing, you know, a bag on their head when you're meeting one to one with someone, and there's just another person in their room, but there's not really another person there. So that's a personal preference.

Competition from Big Players

The main reason though, when it comes down to more like kind of business strategy and can you build a business around this, is just thinking, can you really provide something that the big players won't arrive at eventually? What I mean is that, you know, Zoom has already got AI features, you know, you can write down in the comments if I'm not quite on the money with these, but yeah, Zoom has already got AI features. Google meets teams, AI is so much part of what Microsoft and what Google are doing. And one of the reasons, you just got to look at the history of Google trying to add AI into their search, that these big companies are so slow. It's because they have a responsibility and a reputation to uphold, because they're not just working with people that have joined their business through product hunt, or, you know, they have existing customers, hundreds of thousands of existing customers. And they can't afford to use an AI that is bad, that even, you know, 1% of times with 100,000 customers, there's a lot of times that the AI is giving really odd data, isn't it? So they can't afford to do that.

Privacy and Consent Concerns

My third reason is to do with consent, and you can already find news articles about this, and particularly, I think, kind of like local government issues in the UK, is that a meeting bot will join a meeting and take a recording, and the other person in the meeting doesn't really understand what's going on, they haven't consented to that. And there's different laws and other salations all around the world about whether you need one person's consent or both parties consent to take a recording. But I think there's just an etiquette thing, and that's also come up with anyone looking at the Rewind AI Pendant, what's now known as Limitless, is this whole idea that, yes, it's cool if there is a transcript of everything that I do in the day or every meeting that I attend, and I could do amazing things with that. You could even go to, like, give feedback on your sentiment. You could say, oh, well, you know, 2 p.m. that meeting, you came across as being quite stressed. AI has the power to do that, but not everyone is prepared to accept the privacy and the consent consequences of using an AI in such a, you know, like someone using a dictaphone taking that recording.

Data Usage Concerns

And so consent, privacy are concerns, especially because of the data going off to perhaps unknown LLMs. You know, it's one thing to say that we use OpenAI as a partnership and OpenAI's got a reputation, good and bad, to do a chat GPT. People can go and check out OpenAI's policies, but, you know, the market's just been flooded with LLMs, and so people can build services that do things with transcripts that the people on the call would have no idea how that data is being used.

A Reason to Consider Building a Meeting Bot

Now, my one reason that I'd say would justify, and indeed I've been tempted to build a meeting bot with Bubble, and if you're interested in doing that, I've just recorded a video, but I'd recommend checking out a service site, Recool AI, because they are the universal API for meeting bots, I'm really excited to try this out, I'm gonna sign up for a demo. One of the reasons that I would justify launching a business in this direction is because I have first-hand experience, or if I had first-hand experience of a real niche industry that used video calls, because then you can do something that these big players can't do, fine.

Potential Use Cases for Niche Industries

Zoom can summarize the conversation, that's really helpful, but what if, like in a therapy context, again, if we put aside the rather big issues of consent and privacy, what if in a therapy context the therapist could receive live prompts, or nudges, or putting up on theories based on what has just been said by the client in that conversation. You know, even someone with 20 years therapy experience could benefit from the huge knowledge base that AI's got, you can even, of course, feed it with your own knowledge and your own practices and different approaches to how you run as a therapist, and that could then take the current conversation and give live feedback and suggestions to the therapist.

And another example being, we already see this in the AI meeting bots, is the ability to basically give feedback to some of how much they've spoken in the conversation, not just use it with therapy, but also in coaching, also in sales, because each of those will have a different set of best practices or advice of how long each party should speak for. So what if when you're running a meeting, it gives you a little bit of feedback about how long you've spoken for, maybe it's time to throw a question out there and let someone else speak.

Conclusion

So those are my three reasons. First of all, preference of mine is, I think it's a little bit ugly, amusing bot, I don't really like it. Second one is that the big players, surely they're gonna catch up with these essential features, stuff like summaries, stuff like action points, this only a matter of time before every single big video conferencing software, video meeting software is providing those as core features. And then lastly, yeah, consent and privacy. We're just gonna see those terms turn up more and more in conversations about AI and about the fact that we can now transcribe our whole lives.

So there you go, love to hear your thoughts. Please leave a comment down below. And if you wanna learn how you can build an app like this with no code and with Bubble, then click the link down in the description because we've got hundreds of Bubble tutorial videos where we dive into building no code apps with Bubble.