The Debrief

Paste a meeting transcript — get decisions, actions, and follow-ups

Paste any meeting transcript and get decisions, action items with owners and deadlines, follow-up drafts, and cross-meeting pattern analysis — without digging through the notes yourself.

Overview

The Debrief is Recall's professional sibling — same core mechanic (long transcript → extract what matters), but purpose-built for meetings instead of lectures. Where lectures need concepts and testable material, meetings need decisions, owners, deadlines, and accountability. The tool distinguishes between 'someone said we should' (not a decision) and 'we agreed to' (a decision), flags action items with no owner or deadline, detects tensions, and grades meeting health. Series mode is the killer feature — paste your last 3 weekly standups and see which action items disappeared without resolution.

How to use it

1. Pick a mode: Distill (decisions & actions), Follow Up (draft messages), or Series (cross-meeting patterns)
2. Paste your transcript — from Zoom captions, Teams, Otter.ai, Google Meet, or typed notes
3. Select meeting type for better extraction (standup vs. planning vs. client meetings need different outputs)
4. Optionally add attendee names and context
5. Review results — Distill gives you the full meeting output, Follow Up gives you ready-to-send messages

Example

Scenario: Your team just finished a 45-minute sprint planning meeting. Three decisions were made, several tasks assigned, and one disagreement was tabled for later.

What you do: Paste the Zoom transcript, select 'Planning', add attendee names.

Result: Distill produces: 3 decisions (with who drove each), 7 action items (2 flagged as UNASSIGNED — nobody actually took ownership), 2 open questions (one deferred because the PM was absent), detected tension between engineering and design on the timeline, and a meeting health score of 65% efficiency. The ready-to-send follow-up email lists all action items with owners and deadlines.

Tips

• Meeting type matters — a standup extraction focuses on blockers while a planning extraction focuses on ownership and timelines
• UNASSIGNED action items are flagged in red — these are the ones that fall through the cracks if you don't fix them
• The 'Tensions Detected' section is diplomatically worded but honest — use it to address things that got swept under the rug
• Follow Up mode's 'Boss Update' is a 3-5 sentence upward summary — perfect for keeping your manager in the loop without forwarding the full transcript
• Series mode catches the real meeting anti-patterns: topics that keep resurfacing, action items that 'disappeared', and decisions that get revisited
• Individual nudges include urgency ratings and recommended channel (email vs. Slack vs. text) — send the urgent ones immediately