What if your debriefings wrote themselves?

Why debriefings are so often missing

Everyone agrees that a meeting without minutes loses much of its value: decisions are forgotten, actions are not followed up, and absent colleagues never know what was decided. The lack of minutes is one of the major causes of inefficient meetings. Yet writing them is often the task nobody wants.

The reasons are always the same. Taking notes while taking part in the discussion is difficult. Formatting the notes afterwards takes time. And by the time the report is sent, a few days later, participants have already moved on. Our article on the purpose of a meeting report explains what is lost when this step is skipped.

Speech recognition and artificial intelligence change this equation. Perfony uses them to take over most of the writing, so that every meeting can have its minutes without extra effort.

Structure your thinking with the R.I.D.A. method

R.I.D.A. stands for "Record of Information, Decisions and Actions". This is the purpose of good meeting minutes: participants, and even those who were absent, must be able to find what was said, classified according to three criteria.

• Information: what was shared or presented, with no decision attached.
• Decisions: what was decided, and which now applies.
• Actions: what must be done, by whom and by when.

Perfony lets you identify each of these categories at a glance in a full report. It also gathers all decisions in a record of decisions and all actions in the action plan, so that you do not have to reread every report to find them.

No need to write: dictate your reports

Perfony includes a speech recognition feature that lets you dictate your report instead of typing it. It is easier and faster, especially just after a meeting, when the points are still fresh. This technology was developed in partnership with Microsoft.

During a Microsoft Teams meeting, Perfony can also transcribe the discussion in real time and identify each speaker. The transcript then serves as raw material for the report. The step-by-step procedure is described in the Academy: using speech recognition to dictate a report.

Let AI detect decisions and actions

Moving to the R.I.D.A. method is easier with an intelligent feature that does the sorting for you. The AI detects actions and decisions in the text, identifies them in the report and automatically classifies them in the record of decisions and in the action plan.

Concretely, a sentence such as "We agree to postpone the launch by two weeks, and Julie will inform the customer by Friday" produces a decision (launch postponed by two weeks) and an action (inform the customer, owner Julie, due Friday). The example is fictitious. You keep control: each proposal can be corrected or deleted before the report is sent. The Academy explains how to use the artificial intelligence feature in a report.

Relevant and systematic reporting without making the task more complicated: this is what Perfony sets out to do.

Your templates, your rules

Every organisation has its habits. With Perfony, you can create your own report templates: sections, order of items, level of detail. If your company requires a very specific model, the Perfony team can import it for you so that your reports match your organisation's requirements.

Templates also save time before the meeting: the agenda becomes the outline of the report, and each item is ready to receive its information, decisions and actions.

What an automatic debriefing looks like, step by step

1. Before the meeting: the agenda is prepared in Perfony from a report template.
2. During the meeting: the discussion is transcribed in real time, or the facilitator dictates the key points item by item.
3. At the end of the meeting: the AI proposes the decisions and actions it has detected. The facilitator checks them with the participants, which avoids disagreements later.
4. Right after the meeting: the report is sent to participants and absentees in a few clicks.
5. In the following weeks: actions appear in the action plan with their owner and due date, and reminders go out automatically.

What still requires a human

Automation does not remove responsibility. Someone still has to validate the report before it is sent, check that sensitive information is worded appropriately and make sure that each action has the right owner. AI drafts, people decide.

Data protection also matters: meeting content is often confidential. Perfony is hosted in France. To compare the different ways of producing minutes, see our meeting minutes page.