Never Take Boring Notes Again: How to Use AI to Summarize Meetings, Videos, and Articles

Picture this…

You’ve just survived another two-hour, soul-crushing Zoom meeting. Your brain feels like scrambled eggs. Just then, a message from your boss pops up: “So, what were the key action items from the meeting?”

And your mind… goes completely blank. Crickets. 😶

You remember a lot of important things were discussed, but it’s all just a fuzzy, jumbled mess in your head. Now you’re frantically trying to decipher your own messy, cryptic notes…

Or how about this one?

You watched an incredible, two-hour podcast on YouTube. You know it was packed with gold-nugget insights. But a week later, when you actually need to use that information, all you can remember is, “Yeah, it was something good…” but you can’t recall what that ‘something’ actually was.

This is the story of our lives, isn’t it?

We’re living in a world drowning in information, but our brain’s capacity to retain it is the same as it was 100 years ago. Our brain isn’t a hard drive; it’s designed to forget.

But… what if you had a magical assistant?
An assistant that could listen to every meeting, watch every video, and read every long article for you, and then, in just 5 minutes, give you clean, concise, point-by-point notes?

This isn’t a dream. This is AI.

In this article, I’m going to free you from the boring, old-fashioned way of note-taking. I’ll show you the AI tools and techniques to transform hours of information into minutes of powerful insights.

So if you want to clear the clutter from your brain and only remember the stuff that actually matters, this article is for you.

🧠 Catching Up? If you learned how to conquer your email inbox with AI in our last article (How I Use AI to Clear My Inbox in 10 Minutes a Day), then get ready to conquer your information inbox!

The Real Enemy: It’s Not Your Memory, It’s “The Forgetting Curve”

Before we jump to the solution, let’s understand the enemy. Our enemy isn’t a “bad memory.” It’s a scientific phenomenon called “The Forgetting Curve.”

A German psychologist, Hermann Ebbinghaus, proved that humans forget approximately 50-80% of new information within just 24 hours! 🤯

That means most of what you hear in a meeting or watch in a video is gone from your brain by the next day. Taking notes is our way of fighting this curve, but it’s often incomplete and exhausting.

AI changes this game completely. AI doesn’t forget.

The 3-Step AI Summarization System (Your Magical Assistant)

So, how do we control this flood of information? Here’s a super simple, 3-step system you can use.

Step 1: Choose Your Weapon (Pick the Right AI Tool)

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There’s a specialized tool for every job.

• For Long Articles & Text:
  • Tool: ChatGPT or QuillBot’s Summarizer
  • Why? They are masters at understanding text. You simply copy-paste an entire article, and they’ll give you a summary in seconds. QuillBot’s free tool is fantastic for getting started.
• For YouTube Videos & Podcasts:
  • Tool: Eightify (a browser extension)
  • Why? This is pure magic. You go to a 2-hour video, click a button, and on the side, the AI gives you a timestamped, point-by-point summary of the entire video. You don’t even need to watch the whole thing!
• For Online Meetings (Zoom/Google Meet):
  • Tool: Tactiq.io or Otter.ai
  • Why? These tools transcribe your meetings live and, as soon as the meeting ends, the AI automatically emails you a summary of the entire conversation, complete with action items and key decisions. Imagine, no more stress about taking notes in a meeting!

Step 2: The Art of the Perfect “Summarization” Prompt (Learn to Command the AI)

You’ve got the tool, but for the best results, you need to give the AI the right command. You can use this simple template:

Act as an expert [Your Topic, e.g., a business strategist].
Summarize the following text/transcript for me.
My goal is to understand the [Your Goal, e.g., the main marketing strategies discussed].
Please provide the summary in the following format:
- 5 key bullet points.
- A list of all action items mentioned.
- One paragraph conclusion.

This tells the AI you don’t just want a summary; you want a summary from a specific perspective, in a specific format.

Step 3: Refine and Humanize (Add Your Secret Sauce)

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This is the most crucial step that most people skip.

An AI-generated summary will be 90% perfect, but you are the only one who can add that final 10% of human insight and context.

• Read the AI’s summary.
• Add your own thoughts or questions to it.
• Rephrase a few things in your own words so it’s not just information, but your understanding.

The AI is your assistant, not your boss. The final touch should always be yours.

🚀 Next Level: Summarizing information is great. But real power comes when you use that information to learn something new. See how I do it here: How I Use AI to Learn Anything Faster (The Ultimate Student’s Guide).

The Bigger Picture: Why This is a Superpower

This isn’t just about saving 10-15 minutes.

When you learn to consume information faster, you:

• Learn more in less time: You can get the wisdom of 5 long articles in the time it takes others to read just one.
• Make better decisions: You always have clear, concise notes from meetings and conversations, so you never forget what’s important.
• Free up your mind: When you know an AI is taking notes for you, you can focus on listening and understanding in a meeting, not just writing.

It frees your brain from being a clerk and lets it do the job of a CEO: to think and strategize.

Your Next Action

Congratulations! 🥳 You now know how to surf the ocean of information instead of drowning in it.

You’ve learned how to capture and distill information.
But now the question is: Where do you store all this valuable, distilled knowledge? In your brain? No, your brain will forget.

Real Power Users collect all this information in one place, in a “Second Brain”—a digital brain they can access anytime, anywhere.

And in the next article, I’m going to teach you exactly how to build one.

➡️ Get Ready to Read: How to Build a “Second Brain” with AI: A Step-by-Step Guide to Organizing Your Knowledge

In that guide, we’ll learn how to use AI to organize all your learnings in one place, so you never lose an important idea again.

Over to You!

Which of these AI summarization tools are you most excited to try? Are you going to use one for your next meeting or video? Let me know in the comments below!