What is Vowel?
Vowel is an ai integrated meeting and collaboration software which has grown substantially in popularity since its launch in 2018. After securing 13.5m in series A funding in 2021, the company has rocketed in adoption. Vowel’s co-founders, Andrew Berman & Paul Fischer, saw a gap in the online meeting market. As we can all relate, the pandemic increased meetings at an exponential rate. As we all struggled to get our sea legs in a new and immediate remote work environment, we called meeting after meeting out of desperation and necessity.
Zoom became the industry standard for most companies primarily as a means to meet with clients as well as internal teams. Feature-rich and lots of flexibility gave it an edge over other meeting software. As adoption rose, at least from my perspective, it became evident that it was most compatible and easiest to install and get up and running. Gone were the days of guessing whether the client or customer would need training on how to open your web ex, and thank god for that because many times I didn’t know how to show them. Now, while Microsoft Teams also grew substantially in popularity, I found it was more adapted for internal company meetings, especially in the corporate landscape, while Zoom was the preferred option for working with clients and customers.
Fast forward to today and the advent of AI. I was introduced to Vowel through a colleague and touted as the “Zoom Killer,” and my interest was piqued. From the first time I used it, I was hooked.
Installation & Setup
Vowel is incredibly easy to set up, and with a web interface, there is no need for anyone to download or install any software. As the meeting host, you can use the web interface or the native app. Installing takes just a couple of clicks and has mobile and desktop apps for iOS, Android, Mac, & PC.
My Favorite Features
This thing is loaded with features but simple; I’m confident even my mom could handle it without issue. The AI integration is by far one of my favorite features, but it’s not all there is. The Vowel team has created some unique features I never knew I needed. For a comprehensive list of all features, you can see them in full detail. Below are just a few of the best that I feel set Vowel apart from Microsoft Teams and Zoom specifically:
The User Interface (as a whole):
The UI itself feels good. It’s intuitive and organized really well. So many features are compartmentalized optimally, and nested features are intuitive. I can hide myself from view, which has helped me further focus on the meeting and spend less time wondering why I wore that stupid graphic t-shirt.
Sharing my screen even feels like an upgrade from Zoom or Teams. I can emulate others, so I’m 100% sure of what I’m sharing and what the participants are seeing. The emulation feature also ensures I am confident the other participants can clearly see what I’m trying to demo.
The participants are to the left, while the right side nests the overview summary, notes, transcriptions, or a split view, letting you view the transcription and notes together while not monopolizing too much of the participant space to the left.
Transcription:
Ok, so this has simplified my admin work by hours. When you are recording, the entire conversation is dictated and time-stamped. Great for a deep dive review of what was said if necessary, but not something I typically go back and read. Thankfully, Vowel has solved that as well. A handy keyword search is available for me to find exact parts of the conversation without having to watch the whole video. It’s great for when I’m reviewing meetings and coaching calls historically trying to pull out specific direction or discussion topics.
Pro Tip | Bookmarks: You can use bookmarks to call out a specific topic within a meeting so that you can jump right back to it afterward. This has been helpful in getting to the meat of a topic I want to dive back into.
Summary:
This is one of my favorite features. The GPT-powered summarization doesn’t just condense the conversation into a consumable output – it’s good at it too. This allows me to stay 100% present with whomever I am speaking with and not worry about missing a beat. No more note-taking or even trying to read my garbled notes after the meeting. For larger groups, it does a fantastic job of documenting the meeting minutes and even calls out individuals who spoke or what they talked about. It does capture the chit-chat in the beginning, which isn’t ideal, but it’s also editable.
The summary isn’t just a bulleted list. It creates an overview of the meeting as a whole and then breaks topics into editable toggled sections. You can easily copy and paste it into your wiki or into an email to distribute to the rest of the team. All places I’ve copied this content to thus far have retained the formatting and function, which I was also impressed by.
Action Items:
Still in alpha, the action items attempt to pull out what action items were discussed from the meeting and assign them to the right individual. I won’t say this is perfect by any stretch just yet, but what I love about it is that you can delete the ones that aren’t relevant and/or add new ones to it. You can do this easily directly from the meeting. I always have Vowel generate action items for me after every meeting. While I copy and paste these into my notion notes, they also appear in my Vowel dashboard along with my other meetings’ action items. All in one place, I can quickly review action items from past meetings effortlessly. I’ll talk more about organization towards the bottom, but Vowel makes it so so easy to organize my various meetings into categories.
Notes & Agendas:
I touched on these briefly above, but Vowel comes packed with a pre-made note and agenda template library that jump-start your prep. It comes with Daily Standup, Focused Agendas, Goals – Discussion – Action Items, One on One’s, Team Meetings, and a Blank Page. Choose your poison or create your own.
All of the templates are customizable and have toggles by each topic that can be used to set a time limit for each agenda item. Powerful to be able to hold meetings to the time allotment and avoid getting deep into rabbit holes. I find with these; I am way more efficient with my meetings.
Finally, there is a cheat sheet for any of the templates, or if you’re using the blank page to use markdown to create functionality or tag individuals within the notes. To the left is a sneak peek at some of the markdown available.
Talk Distribution:
If you are anything like me, I like to talk, and I can really monopolize a conversation with all the brilliant earth-shattering thoughts I have in my head. This feature has helped improve my coaching conversations, gain more participation from others, and dramatically reduce the headcount in typical meetings.
A percentage shows in the top left corner of all meeting participants and increases and decreases solely on your piece of the overall conversation. The more you speak, the higher your percentage. Of all of the features in Vowel, this is my absolute favorite.
It has helped me keep what I say to a minimum and focus on listening to others. It is actually training me to be a better listener. Sometimes it’s almost gamified where I’m shooting for a certain percentage to see if I can hit it. It has improved my communication skills and helps me encourage other team members to speak up if I haven’t heard from them.
This also helps really identify whether “this meeting could’ve been an email.”
Headcount in meetings is incredibly expensive and wasteful. If you regularly notice attendees who are not contributing, then you can make smarter choices about who to include in the meetings moving forward and who can focus on their work. Plus, with the accuracy and efficiency of the recordings and meeting summarizations, you can quickly catch anyone up to speed who may have missed it.
Permissions:
I won’t dive too deep here, but I did want to mention that you can allow your participants to have full access to recordings, transcriptions, summaries, and action items, or you can make these settings private. The only caveat is that you need to set this when the meeting starts. If you are taking private notes, be careful to double-check and ensure it is not viewable to everyone on the call.
Workspaces & Dashboard:
Whether part of a small team or department at a larger company or have clients/customers you work with on your own, the workspaces feature allows you to segment access to recordings, transcriptions, notes, action items, etc, to only those you want to have it. Honestly, this is quickly becoming my documentation hub, where transferring notes to another platform or wiki is getting too cumbersome.
A couple of highlights to call out here are 1-click meetings, easily create new agenda templates, view clipped files from longer meetings, see your schedule, and more.
Folders:
You can easily organize your meetings by category, client, or department; you name it. Easily share the recordings with folders, people, or workspaces. Have complete control over access while giving flexibility to your organization’s needs.
Analytics:
Get meeting insights to track your efficiency, talk time, and use of filler words over time. This data isn’t just interesting to look at; it’s impacting how I carry myself and contribute…It’s improving ME.
Price:
Last but not least, the price can’t be beaten. The free version has some feature restrictions, notably the 40-minute max on meetings. This became a problem quickly for me. The good news is that the Business plan is just $19.99/mo, and I have not encountered any feature, meeting time, or meeting count restrictions. There is an Enterprise account on its way but not available yet. You can see their pricing here.
In closing, as you can tell, I kind of like this platform. For someone who typically spends between 20-25 hours a week in online meetings, it has quickly become not just a cool application but a tool that is improving my efficiency, my presence and helping me make better decisions. It’s changing how I interact with others and how I contribute to every interaction I’m a part of.