Meeting Bot

Paste a meeting URL and the bot joins the call. Twenty minutes after the meeting ends, a fresh brief lands in Hamster — with the transcript, summary, decisions, and follow-ups already wired into your knowledge graph.

Overview

The Meeting Bot turns spoken context into a first-class Hamster artefact. You hand it a meeting link from Google Meet, Zoom, or Microsoft Teams. It joins the call, records the transcript, and once the meeting ends it generates a structured AI summary, creates a brief and document, links it to the right initiative, and posts a notification back to the channel where you started.

This is the input pipe most aligned with how founders already work: "I talk to customers, then I build." Customer calls and team meetings are the highest-signal source of refinement context — and historically the hardest thing to get into Hamster. The Meeting Bot closes that gap. It also reinforces the way teams capture interviews and customer stories: those conversations get a structured home rather than dying in Notion or Otter.

The flow is asynchronous and fault-tolerant. Each stage — bot dispatch, transcript fetch, summary generation, knowledge-graph linking, Slack notification — runs as its own job with retries, so a transient failure on one step doesn't drop the whole capture.

How It Works

Submit a meeting URL — Open the command palette (Cmd+K) and pick Join Meeting, or use the Hamster Slack bot. Paste the meeting link and click Join.
The bot joins the call — A meeting bot connects within seconds, appears as a participant, and records audio for the duration of the call. You can leave the bot running while you focus on the conversation.
The meeting ends — When the call wraps, the bot leaves automatically. No "save before quit" step.
Transcript and summary land — A few minutes later, Hamster pulls the transcript and runs it through structured AI summary generation. The output includes a meeting title, identified participants, decisions, action items, strategic insights, and a concise markdown summary.
A brief appears in your workspace — Hamster creates a brief and document seeded with the summary. The brief is linked to mentioned initiatives and tasks in your knowledge graph automatically, so it shows up in the right places.
Slack pings you — If you started from Slack, the notification posts as a thread reply in the originating channel. Otherwise it lands in your default notifications surface. The ping includes the meeting title, top action items, decision count, and a deep link to the full summary in Hamster.

What the Summary Captures

Every meeting summary is structured so the knowledge graph can use it:

Meeting title — A short, human-readable name.
Participants — Speakers identified from the transcript.
Action items — Each with a task, optional owner, and optional due date.
Decisions — What was decided, and which participants were involved.
Insights — Strategic themes, risks, and opportunities surfaced in the call.
Mentioned initiatives and tasks — Names and IDs that fuzzy-match into your existing initiatives and tasks.

The full transcript is preserved alongside the summary, so you can always go back to the raw conversation.

Where Transcripts Land

Each meeting becomes a brief in your workspace, and the document inside that brief holds the formatted summary. The transcript itself lives on the brief and can be referenced by the AI when answering questions about the meeting.

Mentioned initiatives are matched against your existing initiative titles. When there's a hit, the new brief is linked to that initiative — so the meeting shows up under the right strategic theme without anyone wiring it manually. Mentioned tasks are linked the same way.

This means a customer call about your onboarding redesign automatically appears connected to the Onboarding initiative, and the action items reference the right tasks.

Starting from Slack

If you have the Slack bot connected, you can dispatch the Meeting Bot directly from a channel or DM. The summary notification posts as a thread reply in the same conversation, so the Slack thread becomes a permanent record of the meeting and its outcomes — with a deep link back to the full brief in Hamster.

If the originating thread is no longer accessible, the notification falls back to a fresh post in the channel.

Privacy and Security

Workspace admins control the bot. Only users with workspace settings.manage permission can dispatch a meeting bot. Other roles can read the resulting briefs once they're created.
Credentials are encrypted. API keys for the meeting provider are stored in the Hamster vault and never appear in job payloads, logs, or client responses.
Meeting URLs are not logged. Meeting links can contain join codes and passcodes, so Hamster only logs the hostname for debugging.
Webhooks are signed. Inbound transcript events are verified with a timing-safe HMAC check, so only your meeting provider can deliver transcripts back to your workspace.
Standard team permissions apply. Meeting briefs follow the same role-based access rules as any other brief — only members of your Hamster team can read them.

Tell participants the bot is recording. Most meeting providers also display a recording indicator while the bot is in the call.

Supported Meeting Providers

The Meeting Bot accepts URLs from:

Google Meet
Zoom
Microsoft Teams

URLs are validated client-side before the bot is dispatched, so you'll see an error immediately if you paste a link from an unsupported provider.

Tips

Submit the URL a minute or two before the meeting starts so the bot has time to join. Joining late is fine — the bot records from the moment it connects.
Keep meeting names in your calendar consistent with initiative names. The summary's "mentioned initiatives" matcher fuzzy-matches against initiative titles, so consistent naming improves auto-linking.
Use the Slack dispatch path for customer calls. The thread reply gives non-Hamster stakeholders a one-click way to read the full summary without an account switch.
If a transcript fails to process, check the brief — failure state is captured on the brief itself with the last error, and you can re-dispatch from the same meeting URL.