#1: Fathom (fathom.video)
Labeled as an AI Assistant, we’ve found Fathom’s note-taking and recording bot to be an amazing addition to our video calls. The best part about it is that it integrates with the 3 major video conference platforms: Zoom, Teams, and Google Meet. So, regardless of what our clients use, we are able to leverage it.
What it does:
Fathom joins calls as a separate attendee. It records the entire call, transcribes it, and then recaps the meeting with attendees, highlights, and action items.
How we use it:
We started trying it out individually and saw a lot of benefits to keep us from having to keep notes (I’m horrible at note-taking). During the sales process, having the recordings and transcripts to reference for our proposals and delivery hand-offs was already worth the cost of the pro version. However, after using the trial teams version, we began using it across more members of our team for almost any client call. Now, we are able to share the videos we want with other team members, search content across all shared recordings, and group content into playlists that keep things organized. It is also connected to our CRM (Hubspot), Slack, and Zapier to allow us to do more with the data outside of the Fathom platform.
What’s great about Fathom:
For those of us who are bad note-takers, or memory-challenged, it’s an amazing tool to be able to reference what conversations were had and what was said. Being able to not bother other team members with questions about what took place in a meeting is also a time-saver.
What’s not so great:
It does require everyone on a Zoom call to get notified that the call is being recorded. For most, this isn’t an issue, but it can pose a potential privacy concern for members of a call. I’m careful to clarify why it’s on the call and ask if anyone has an issue with it, but it might take some time for attendees to warm up to the idea. Also, I wish it was smart enough to only join once if multiple team members that are using the app are on a call. It’s a bit annoying when 3 of our team members all have Fathom notetakers joining all at once and we have to figure out which one is staying.
#2: Fastbots (fastbots.ai)
A growing number of AI-infused chat bots are coming into the market, and I can’t say that I’ve tried them all, but I’m a big fan of Fastbots.
What it does:
Fastbots allows you to build a data store of the content on your website, which becomes the source of its knowledge when chatting with a website user. Unlike a general GPT-style chatbot, this one only engages around the specific things you tell it.
How we use it:
It’s currently being used on our website (soliddigital.com). We have loaded the entire website into its database and included some additional source material. The bot has also been given specific instructions on how to respond to topics that users ask about. For example, if someone is asking about what our favorite tools to use for marketing are, we want it to be specific and not reference all the tools we have used in the past.
What’s great about Fastbots:
Fastbots is really easy to use. I have been able to create example bots for our clients in just a couple of minutes. It will use your website’s sitemap.xml file to scour the content and store it in the database with only a couple of clicks. Fine-tuning the bot is pretty easy, with prompts that are in plain English.
Additionally, I really like seeing the history of chats that have occurred. It’s insightful to see what users are asking about and how it is responding. It has not always responded exactly the way I would like, but then it’s helpful for the fine-tuning of future conversations.
What’s not so great:
Obviously, we think it’s still important that the users of our website get the full experience of what we’ve built. I mean, we are a web design company. We don’t want the chatbot to be a shortcut to understanding (or misguiding) our value proposition. That said, it has probably helped keep some unqualified companies from reaching out to us. I have definitely noticed a drop in spammy contact form submissions and irrelevant questions being emailed to us since installing it on our site.
#3: ClickUp (clickup.com)
For project management, we use a platform called ClickUp, and they’ve been doing a great job integrating AI into their application.
What it does:
The ClickUp AI addition allows our team to:
- Suggest questions to bring to clients to get the best information for the task
- Outline steps and acceptance criteria for a straightforward project/task in seconds
- Give step-by-step instructions for the actions needed to complete a task
- Write out short how-to guides for clients
- Suggest subtasks and action items based on a brief description
- Recap all activity on a task for a specified period of time
What’s great about ClickUp AI:
The way it’s built into the platform is very intuitive. It’s just integrated into the different fields and editors within the application. So, there’s no need to change the way you do things; it’s just there. It has access to a lot of data that could be used to do predictive analysis and assessment of where we have issues. Hypothetically, this system could find things we don’t notice and suggest improvements that we never thought of.
What’s not so great:
Like many other AI interfaces, it can still take a few iterations to get exactly what you want. The output can sometimes be longer and more detailed than necessary.
Have an efficiency-saving AI tool that’s worth sharing? Give us a shout.
