Intro
I just finished a great call with a client but there's a problem. I forgot to write down any notes. How am I going to remember the key highlights and conversations from that meeting and be able to share that with others?
No problem, let me show you a free tool that integrates with Zoom, Teams and Google Meet and will allow you to never have to take notes again. So I just finished this client meeting
Grain
about an hour ago but I've got the entire video including a complete searchable transcript at my fingertips and so much more. I'm using an app called Grain. You can find out more at Grain.com.
Not only do I have a searchable video that I can look through, but as you can see, as I scan and drag my slider, I've got the complete transcript available to me here on the right-hand side as well.
So rather than wasting my time going back and forth within the video, I can actually search for key words here within the transcript. So for example, I know that we were talking about a calendar and exactly, look at that. Five times we spoke about the word calendar.
I can quickly and easily go to those sections of the meeting and find out exactly
what I'm looking for. But if I also want to zero in on when someone said something,
I can come down here to the timeline. Here, you can see that these purple shades indicate when someone was speaking. So maybe I remember that Lucian said something really key near the end of our meeting. Well, I'm going to come in here
and click Perfect. Yes, this is exactly what I was looking for. I can zero in on exactly
when my client said something important and then I can come over here to the transcript. Now, you'll notice that something is highlighted here. What you can do with any portion of this text is click and drag.
And I'm going to select this highlight icon. And what it's going to do is create a video highlight of that area. Next to the timeline, I can click on Highlights. And here, you can see, I've created some other highlights already so I can create a bit of a best of list or a highlight reel of that conversation.
But wait, it gets even better with the help of AI. Coming very, very soon
within the Grain interface is the ability to summarize your entire meeting. So under Summary, I've got the entire meeting summarized in just eight notes. And as I review these specific bullet points, it's done an exceptionally good job of summarizing what we spoke of in a 45 minute span.
And if I want to, I can click on any of these areas
and go directly to that part of the meeting. Is there someone on my team or maybe even the client itself who I want to send a summary to? There is a Copy Summary link here which will copy it to my clipboard and then I can send it to them via an email.
But there's another great AI function which is coming soon as well. And that is the Q and A section. In this case, Grain is going to be listening to all of the questions that were asked throughout the meeting and then provide the answer down below.
So I can quickly look at what questions did the client have, how did I respond or vice versa depending on the theme of that particular meeting. And I've got it all at my fingertips here. But now that you know a little bit about the value that Grain can give you after the meeting, how easy is it to set up Grain with your video conferencing software?
Setup
Well, the easiest way to use Grain is to integrate it directly with your calendar.
In that case, Grain can identify all of the meetings on your calendar that contain a video conferencing link and then automatically be invited and start to record that particular meeting.
Here, you can see, under my Settings, I'm going to click on Account Settings and then select Recording. And you can see that I already have Grain connected to my Google Calendar account.
Now, any meeting that either I create or a meeting that someone invites me to and has a video conferencing link within it will be invited and start to record in that meeting as well.
Now, there's a few different settings you can adjust here if you don't want it to record all of your meetings or in this case, I've toggled this one that says, "Only record "if I am the calendar event organizer." So you can tweak it for your own needs. With this calendar integration in place, I can now see all of my meetings here within my Grain account
and I can even launch them here as well. But what if you don't have the integration set up or if you want something to be recorded on a meeting that you were not the event organizer for? Well, that's where you can paste in the meeting invite link or the meeting ID up here at the very top.
So let me show you how to do that with Zoom. So here I am within my Zoom meeting and I'm about to begin. But I want to make sure that Grain is going to record this meeting as well.
And perhaps I forgot to set up the calendar integration. All I need to do is come up here and paste the meeting invite link and select Record. And now, the Grain recorder is going to join the call.
Here, I've been notified] in the bottom right-hand corner that Grain is waiting in the waiting room because I have that set up within Zoom. I'm going to say Admit. And now, Grain has been entered into this meeting] and will record everything going forward.
Now, it's always recommended that you let your meeting participants know that you are recording this meeting. But Grain helps us out in that case as well. It will automatically send a chat to everyone when it first enters the meeting room, letting them know that it is being recorded.
And if you like, you can share that link 'cause maybe others would like to benefit from the transcript as well.
Library
Back within our Grain account, we can manage our library of previously recorded meetings. So I can quickly and easily jump back into another meeting. And even if you've recorded hundreds of meetings, Grain makes it really easy for usto find out what we're looking for.
We can filter by owner, date, include our own tags, or my personal favorite is people. So for example, if I click on People, I can say, "I want to go back to that meeting "where I met with Martha." Well, that was easy enough.
I've now zeroed in directly on that particular meeting. Here, within the library, we can also look at our Highlights. And just like I created a few highlights for a meeting I had earlier today, I can collect all of my highlights in one place.
And with just a single click, I can copy this link to the clipboard and share that highlight with others. So if I want to share these ideas and maybe support my own suggestions with evidence from my meetings, I can do so in a matter of clicks. But if you want to collect a variety of things
from multiple meetings in one place and send it out as a polished video, Grain allows you to do that with the Stories feature. So for example, I've started to create a story called New Software Demo where I'm collecting the responses from people which I've shown my product to.
If I click on this, I can give it a title and I can break it down into different sections and then include those highlights, those clips within those areas. If I hit the play button here in the top right-hand corner, and now, I've got a polished video with all of my highlights in one place that I can quickly and easily share with others.
So if you never want to forget what was said and have meeting highlights at your fingertips, be sure to check out Grain at Grain.com.
And if you want to look and sound your best on Zoom, be sure to click on this video next where I show you seven settings that you're going to want to check before your next meeting.
