People often perceive meetings as being unproductive. Ineffective meetings are bad for morale, negatively impact employees’ health, and are directly linked to organizations' wasted time and resources. While the remote work ecosystem is now transforming patterns of communication between teams and individuals located at distance, yet the current communication tools fall short in fully supporting the online meetings experience.

MeetCues is a new tool for humanizing virtual meetings. The tool allows attendees to reflect in real-time or post-meeting. To reflect in real-time, MeetCues enables attendees to react on what is being discussed by tagging key points and action items. These virtual crowdsourced tags are translated into an emoji cloud visualization, which allows attendees to observe an online meeting’s room atmosphere. To reflect post-meeting, MeetCues generates an email summary by processing a meeting’s automatically transcribed content. The summary allows attendees to post-reflect on their meeting through a replay of the interactive timeline and memorable parts of the meetings. The most memorable parts are scored by AI algorithms in terms of phrases rich of ten conversational dimensions (e.g., knowledge exchange, conflict resolution, or social support), and phrases integrating different points of view.

In future, tools like MeetCues could transform the ways we work and collaborate remotely. Imposing physical distancing amid the current COVID-19 pandemic, not only transformed the ways we communicate virtually but also affected our experience. MeetCues promises to bring back to the virtual, remote world our in-person meetings’ experience.

Publications

• MeetCues: Supporting Online Meetings Experience. IEEE VIS 2020 PDF