Grindr? Doodles? What do you do during boring meetings?

            <img class="js-image-replace" alt="Woman daydreaming during boring meeting" src="http://www.mangobaaz.ml/wp-content/uploads/2018/06/grindr-doodles-what-do-you-do-during-boring-meetings.jpg" width="976" height="549"/><br/>Image copyright
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                Dreaming about that Oscar acceptance speech?
            
        </figcaption></figure><p class="story-body__introduction">For many of us, meetings are a boring waste of time but technology could soon help make them more interesting and productive. </p><p>What do you do during a boring meeting? I canvassed some opinions on Twitter and the results were enlightening. </p><p>Some people compose haikus, others play meeting bingo, seeing how many pre-agreed words they can chuck in to the conversation.</p><p>Some secretly check out Grindr on their phones or watch catch-up TV, while others fiddle with their jewellery, doodle, or simply nod off.</p><p>What's frankly worrying - if you're the meeting holder, that is - surveys show that the vast majority of us confess to doing other things during meetings.</p><p>And there's always one person - often a man who loves the sound of his own voice - who drones on and on so no-one else can get a word in edgeways.</p><p>Wouldn't it be fantastic if an artificially intelligent (AI) meeting bot could tell him to shut up?</p><p>Well, that day may not be too far away.</p><figure class="media-landscape has-caption full-width">
            
            
            
            
            
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                Many women feel they don't have a voice in meetings
            
        </figcaption></figure><p>It is "very feasible" for an AI to recognise when one person is dominating a meeting, or when a circular discussion keeps coming back to the same point, says James Campanini from videoconferencing company, BlueJeans.</p><p>"If no new points are made after a while, the AI could suggest to wrap up," says Cynthia Rudin, a computer science professor at the Massachusetts Institute of Technology.</p><p>"While it's a lovely idea to think everybody will be fabulous at running meetings, everybody is not," observes Elise Keith from Lucid Meetings, a US-based meeting management platform.</p><p>An AI agent "might be able to determine whether a meeting leader is ensuring that each participant is being heard equally and fairly," she says.</p><figure class="media-landscape no-caption body-width">
            
            
            
            
            
        
        
    </figure><h2 class="story-body__crosshead">More Technology of Business</h2><figure class="media-landscape no-caption full-width">
            
            
            
            
            
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    </figure><p>Voicera, founded in 2016 in Silicon Valley, has created an AI assistant called Eva. As well as taking notes, Eva identifies a meeting's action items and decisions.</p><p>"If AI can do most of the mundane and drudgery work during business meetings, that leaves more space for humans to think about strategy and vision," argues Niki Iliadis at the London-based Big Innovation Centre, an innovation hub working in AI.</p><p>In Japan earlier this year, the prefecture of Osaka - which is responsible for nine million people -started using AI to transcribe and summarise the 450 cabinet meetings it holds annually. </p><p>The AI recognises from the context whether speakers are using the Tokyo or Osaka dialects, and who is speaking as it transcribes.</p><p>So far it has halved the time needed to produce summaries and has cut staff overtime, the prefecture says.</p><figure class="media-landscape has-caption full-width">
            
            
            
            
            
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                BlueJeans is trying to make meetings more efficient
            
        </figcaption></figure><p>How about not even having to be physically present at a meeting?</p><p>One feature which shouldn't be far away is having an AI avatar join meetings for you, when you're running late, says Mr Campanini. </p><p>So "my AI identifiable creature joins the meeting, takes notes for me, and when I join, it stops and sends me the notes," he says.</p><p>Quite often we find we've been invited to a meeting that isn't relevant to us or is at a very inconvenient time. So tech firms are also working on AIs to help decide who should attend and when the meeting should be, Ms Keith says.</p><p>One Stockholm start-up, Mentimeter, is making it easier for meeting participants to give instant anonymous feedback about whether they find a discussion useful or tedious.  </p><p>"One way of solving sucky meetings is letting the audience take part in a simple way," says Johnny Warstrom, the start-up's chief executive.</p><figure class="media-landscape has-caption full-width">
            
            
            
            
            
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                Mentimeter thinks instant feedback makes for better discussions in meetings
            
        </figcaption></figure><p>Participants using the software can make open-ended responses or vote in multiple-choice quizzes.</p><p>When the presenter turns on the word cloud feature, a screen is updated as participants submit comments, and the most frequently used words appear largest on the screen.</p><p>Such anonymous live feedback has "fundamentally changed the dynamics of a presentation", says Austin Broad from financial services firm AFH Wealth Management.</p><p>He now spends more time discussing unexpected responses than "simply confirming comprehension", he says.</p><p>Mr Warstrom believes the software allows less assertive participants to have a say for once.</p><p>"All of a sudden everyone has a voice, someone at the back of the room as much as the person speaking loudest," he says.</p><p>He thinks this is probably why Mentimeter, which has 20 million users and is Sweden's fastest growing start-up, has more female than male customers.</p><p>But until such smart meeting tech becomes more widespread, it seems we'll continue wasting time in the office.</p><figure class="media-landscape no-caption full-width">
            
            
            
            
            
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    </figure><p>According to the MIT Sloan Management Review, executives now spend 23 hours a week in meetings - up from under 10 in the 1960s.  </p><p>And in one large company, a single weekly status meeting, and the preparations for it, took up 300,000 employee hours a year, the Harvard Business Review discovered.  </p><p>Surveys show that the vast majority of us think they're a waste of time. Even bosses have been increasingly critical.</p><p>Tesla boss Elon Musk, for example, told his employees in an April e-mail to "walk out of a meeting or drop off a call as soon as it is obvious you aren't adding value."</p><ul class="story-body__unordered-list"><li class="story-body__list-item"><a href="http://www.bbc.co.uk/news/world-us-canada-43821509" class="story-body__link">Why it's a good idea to walk out of work meetings</a></li></ul><p>"It is not rude to leave, it is rude to make someone stay and waste their time," he added.</p><p>And Amazon boss Jeff Bezos has banned PowerPoint - the bane of many meetings, particularly when speakers simply read out exactly what's on the slides.</p><p>Many meetings duplicate work that's already been done, so making meeting notes easily searchable could help, says Neale Martin from MeetingSense, a US-based meeting software firm.</p><p>Tools that can create agendas, send meeting invitations, distribute notes, and keep track of action items should improve effectiveness, he believes.</p><p>Otherwise, he says, "we have all this videoconferencing and other tech to link us, but we're still doing things as we always did."</p><p>A lot of this may sound like wishful thinking, particularly when you think how often basic tele- and video-conferencing tech fails to work.</p><p>But anything that helps meetings become slightly less painful must surely be welcomed.</p><p>Now, back to your doodling.</p><ul class="story-body__unordered-list"><li class="story-body__list-item">Follow Technology of Business editor Matthew Wall on <a href="https://twitter.com/matthew_wall" class="story-body__link-external">Twitter</a> and <a href="https://www.facebook.com/MatthewWallBBC/" class="story-body__link-external">Facebook</a>

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