That's what secretaries were, and this happened in pretty much every significant business meeting for a long long time.

> Why do you even need an AI assistant here?

To take notes on what we talked about.

> Why do you want to do that?

Because I want to retain the contents of this conversation, and I don't want to be distracted by note-taking. I want to be in the moment and also have a record of what we talked about for later.

> Why do you want a record?

Because I expect that what you're going to say is valuable enough to want to reference later. Perhaps you will give me the name of a cool podcast, or you'll give me very good, detailed advice. Perhaps you'll mention when your upcoming birthday is or a favorite brand of a product, and it'll be useful for gifting.

> Why is that information valuable to you?

Because I value you and your opinions.

But my note taker has been an incredibly helpful piece of technology in professional meetings where domain decisions had to be recorded, high-throughput arguments were exchanged, ideas brought up and todos just verbally agreed on.

I always ask people, kindly and honestly with a lot of room for denial, for agreement to record meetings with them. No, I don't do it in meetings where I know personal topics could come up or be relevant. But those are more on the rare side. In most of my professional exchanges it hasn't posed a problem for anyone.

Now come the replies saying, "as if human note-takers never made mistakes!"

While not all meetings need action items and summaries, having high level notes or the full transcript available when you actually get to implementing a task, or having an agent go through the dozen meetings you had on a project to identify its evolution has made finding and keeping knowledge up-to-date much better in my own experience.

It helps account for bias towards the most recent candidate in interviewing as you can now compare all notes, helps recall some niche details that were said in passing for projects, and holds everyone accountable to what they said.

I still haven't found a perfect solution to actually storing and querying this knowledge, single meetings are easy but wiki-fying them is my end goal, but I'm very happy about the direction dictation, transcriptions and AI parsing of all this knowledge is going.

For me, the value of notes is writing down what’s important to me/the participants, including the actual process.

With the proliferation of AI note taking, this advantage purports to have been democratized, but I'm not quite convinced. Since AI summaries are far from infallible, a mistake is bound to sneak in here and there (note that these aren't mere transcripts, but summaries split into sections). The provider may or may not go in and clean up your AI notes afterwards, any mistakes made by AI are effectively disowned in terms of responsibility, and admin will still pressure providers using these note takers as leverage to be able to see more patients than otherwise possible (admins want to see both lower costs and higher patients seen per day).

When you refuse this type of service, you're demanding a higher bar for your notes, but it comes at the cost of a distracted provider (who has grown accustomed to AI note taking, and only has so many hands, so they have to go back to the keyboard every now and then after checking your body).

In summary I think it comes down to how much you care about note quality versus care quality, which is likely different per person. I don't have any allergies, am not on any medications, and generally only go in for routine checkups, so in my case the notes are more or less a bureaucratic requirement that I'm happy to do away with cheaply. For others this may not be the case, and having quality notes may be critical to their care, in which case they should definitely refuse AI scribes.

Of course, none of what I said goes into privacy, which is a significant matter. However, "iPad scribes" which are essentially third party contractors remotely taking care of the notes already exist, so those concerns which arise even without the use of AI are a bit of a different topic.

Professionals should be using the best tools they're comfortable using. If that means your therapist can ask better questions and make better use of their time because they have a STT model running, I think that's great, counter to the author. Importantly though, in therapy especially, your comfort matters more than time efficiency, and can understand asking for it to be disabled.

Catching up at a coffee shop does not need STT, I agree with OP...but are people really doing this? Sure, there's a few AI obsessed geeks doing it I'm sure, but is that really a main use-case of these devices?

Edited to add, I don't see what problem the OP has, unless they're just uncomfortable saying no.

Congratulations on your apparently very well-functioning brain with seemingly impeccable working memory. I really wasn't expecting this article to go from "I don't want this conversation to be recorded" to "why would anyone even want to take notes, it's not that hard" but I'll say it's certainly a way for this article to go.

This post is incoherent. It begins with an anecdote about AI in a medical context, but later acts as if the whole post is about AI in casual conversation (as it is in the (better-written) post they are responding to). Those are very different contexts with very different considerations! But also both the original post and reply are premised on the idea that saying "actually I'd rather not" is super awkward and makes you "sound like a paranoid Luddite". That is catastrophizing, as evidenced by the anecdote in which the author says "yes I mind" and it is totally fine. Look, different people have different social norms, and while it is good to have boundaries and voice them, it is also good to try to understand where they're coming from, and not respond with "of course I fucking mind, how dare you!" To people like me, an AI transcription of a convo is simply not the same as a third person in the conversation. If you introspect for a bit, you can probably see how I could think the way I do. I certainly understand how someone can think AI is like a third person! If you take the time to understand where people are coming from, it will make it easier for you to politely establish your boundaries and also lower your blood pressure in general.

For every one person that says they mind, it adds likely an additional margin of error AND time to their day. So I really disagree with making people’s lives harder. That’s why technology exists…

And more and more of these systems are on device models, not cloud compute. So I don’t see that argument either

Just saying no sounds simple enough. But social pressure makes that very difficult.

The normalisation of constant recording really has me worried, everything is so monitored now. Privacy just keep get more and more eroded for the sake of minor convenient features and products. At what point do we start deciding these trade off are no longer worth it? And is it even too late to make that decision?

Doctor jots down key bits on a paper chart.

Patient: "I want my records to go with me."

Doctor takes notes on computer.

Patient: "I want to sue my doctor if things go wrong."

Doctor takes copious notes on computer.

Patient: "I hate my doctor looking at the screen instead of me."

Doctor gets an AI scribe.

Patient: "I want my doctor to take the notes."

Doctor: sigh

https://web.archive.org/web/20260707202807/https://firespher...

Taking minutes/notes in a meeting and then being accountable to follow-up on any action items out of that meeting is just standard business process across industries and across the globe. That's not what the author is referring to with their therapist, that's a very different context, but in the context most people on HN find themselves in, having someone take notes is not only not a big deal, it /should/ happen.

Cluely is God-sent, I just want it in my glasses 24/7 and I’m set.

In living memory, I had a HUMAN notetaker in important meetings. After secretaries left the world went to hell and topic experts and engineers were expected to have social graces, everything got worse. We invented new religions like agile to make up for a good old organized secretary.

So - no I won't apologize. My memory is that of a catfish. I see a moving object and i head towards it. Note takers are invaluable, human or not. And AI or NOT voice to text is NOT new.

Lastly, it's worked out to keep everyone honest. I work with clients, we have calls, they're long. I just had a client pull ME up in an old recording agreeing to do something after I said 'no thats out of scope'. So its nice to see some accountability.

Why should I care about your opinion . It’s my convenience your privacy prefs.