Turning A Messy Transcript Into Decisions, Owners And Dates

Auto-summarised meeting notes are useless in a specific way: they tell you what was discussed, which you already know, and not what was decided, which is the only thing you needed.

This is the prompt. The value is almost entirely in the last two rules.

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Here is a raw meeting transcript. Produce three sections.

DECISIONS - only things that were actually settled. One line each,
past tense, stating the decision not the discussion.

ACTIONS - table of: what / who / by when. Use the exact name said in
the transcript. If no date was given, write "no date given" - do not
infer one.

UNRESOLVED - things that were raised and left open. One line each,
phrased as the open question.

Rules:

• If something was discussed but not decided, it belongs in UNRESOLVED,

never in DECISIONS.

• Do not assign an owner who did not verbally accept the task.

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Why "do not infer a date" matters. Without it, every action item gets a plausible-looking deadline that nobody agreed to. Those dates then get copied into a tracker and become real, and three weeks later someone is "late" for a commitment they never made. A visible "no date given" is a prompt to go and get one.

Why "did not verbally accept" matters. Models will happily assign the task to whoever was talking about the problem. The person raising an issue is very often not the person who is going to fix it, and auto-assigning them is how a summary tool starts generating quiet resentment.

The UNRESOLVED section is the one people skip and the one that earns its place. A meeting with eleven items discussed, three decided and eight unresolved is a meeting that needs a follow-up, and the shape of the summary tells you that at a glance.

Works on any transcript source. Better with speaker labels; usable without.