Calendly Enters the Meeting Note Scramble

The realm of productivity has seen note-taking evolve into a cornerstone, with numerous workplace software developers striving to integrate AI for automating tasks based on action items derived from meeting transcripts. Calendly, a prominent name in scheduling and meeting booking software, is now expanding its offerings by introducing its own note-taking product.

Following the trend set by others in this sector, Calendly's note-taker is designed to join meetings, capture audio and video, and transcribe the content. Subsequently, it can generate concise summaries, identify actionable items, and even draft follow-up emails. The company has also indicated that it is piloting a feature, akin to Granola's functionality, which leverages system audio for comprehensive meeting transcription.

Furthermore, Calendly is preparing to launch an AI assistant named Callie. This assistant will harness the company's existing meeting and scheduling infrastructure to streamline meeting setup, verify attendees' availability, and retrieve relevant context from previous discussions. (It's worth noting that Read AI, a meeting notetaking startup, released a comparable email-based assistant earlier this year.)

Tope Awotona, CEO of Calendly, articulated the company's objective to automate workflows for its primary user base: individuals in client-facing roles such as sales and marketing, whose daily schedules are frequently overwhelmed with meetings.

However, the competitive landscape in this domain is notably intense. On one side, there are dedicated meeting note-taking applications like Granola, Fireflies, Read AI, Otter, and Fathom. On the other, broader productivity platforms such as Notion, ClickUp, and Wispr have also incorporated note-taking assistants and features into their comprehensive suites.

Despite this crowded market, Awotona maintains that significant opportunities exist in automating tasks in the crucial period following a meeting's transcription.

“There’s a litany of notetakers, and all of them do a great job of recording and transcribing notes. But a lot of work happens after the meetings. And we think that really that’s where the opportunity for our note-takers to be efficient,” he affirmed.

Addressing privacy concerns, especially given allegations against some competitors like Otter and Granola, Awotona assured that Calendly's note-taker will transparently inform users when a meeting is being recorded. The recording assistant will send a message in the chat to notify all participants of its presence and activity, and any user retains the ability to instruct the app to leave the conversation. Moreover, thanks to its integration with Calendly’s scheduling system, it can even proactively inform individuals before the meeting commences that the call will be recorded.