Author: Maggie Veltri
Why build a meeting bot? Maybe you’re like me, tasked with this as your first project on the job, in which case it may be less of a question of why and more a question of how. I promise to get to that, but if you’re trying to figure out whether a meeting notetaker is worth building, ask yourself a few quick questions. In your last five meetings, was anyone remote? Did anyone use a notetaking bot? If so, did it seem like that person remembered more—or at least didn’t have to? take a moment and look at your calendar. Then maybe look at your boss’s calendar. How many meetings are there? Probably a lot.
We’re at a point where meetings are constant, remote teams are normal, and nobody has the cognitive space to remember everything. A notetaker isn’t about replacing thinking—it’s about not spending your mental energy remembering what you were supposed to think about. Bots can help with that. Quietly, usefully.
Teams need accurate, searchable meeting records—but SaaS notetakers can be costly, opaque, or out-of-policy for sensitive data. Building an in-house Google Meet bot lets you:
This guide walks through one concrete path—scraping Meet’s live captions with a headless Playwright bot, streaming them to a file in real time, then summarizing with OpenAI when the meeting ends— and outlines other options. I’ll spare you some of my missteps (and there were several) and alternative paths just because this would be far too long for anyone to read. For the shortcut to getting your notetaker up and running without more than 8 lines of code, skip to the bottom.
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