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Zola, an automated note taking and meeting summarizer application
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A quick preview of what our development process looked like
Our Project: Zola
Zola is an application run on Amazon's Alexa. The goal is simple: it provides a simple, automated way to record and summarize your team meetings.
About to start a big company meeting? Just say, "Alexa, begin meeting kickoff" and sit back while Zola takes care of everything for you! This quick and convenient process allows members to be engaged and focused on the conversation without the worry of taking notes. Stuck on a split decision? When addressed, Zola can help you with anything! Just provide some information about your topic and Zola will guide you down the right path, even as your co-workers face disagreements.
To tell Zola to stop listening, just say "end meeting" and Zola finishes off your meeting with a comprehensive summary of the main topics as well as an overview of tasks for each member to complete. Zola makes tracking meeting minutes easy so you can focus on what's really important.
How we built it
Our application was built with Python in the Amazon Developer Console. Using OpenAI integration and a lot of trial and error, we were able to create a program with all the capabilities you could imagine, and one heavily needed in the corporate world.
Upon the request of a meeting, Zola listens to multiple voices speaking around it and readily interprets their conversations to provide more comprehensive data. It looks out for its name during conversations, so whenever an employee needs help, Zola can immediately provide live guidance and feedback on ideas and decisions.
Challenges and Accomplishments
Neither of us had used the Alexa development environment before so that provided plenty of challenges. First of all, we spent 3 hours just trying to connect Alexa to the internet. After that, we had lots of trouble deploying the skill.
There were some moments when it looked like we were stuck, but we always eventually pulled through. We learned which GPT prompts worked, which didn't, why responses turned out the way they did, and the basics of how Alexa's dialog API works. It was extremely satisfying seeing this go from an idea to an actual, functional project.
What's next for Zola
One of the reasons that we initially wanted to build Zola was to make use of a very cool Alexa feature: being able to tell apart different voices. We never ended up getting this working, but it is certainly doable in the future. Additionally, we would like more consistency with the output format, and some way of downloading or storing the final meeting notes.
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