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🧰 Tools to Make Online Meetings Suck Less
Published 17 days ago • 6 min read
🧰 Smart tools. Useful tips. Weekly.
Hola friend 👋,
I’m Josep. Each week, I hunt down practical tools and productivity hacks to help digital doers like you do more with less effort.
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This week: tools to make online meetings better.
Several of our team members are remote, so we’re always looking for new ways to stay in sync without spending our entire day in back-to-back calls.
We rely heavily on Google Workspace, but Google Chat often falls short for genuine conversations, and Google Meet tends to feel a bit basic and uninspiring. We also use Zoom frequently – it's a slight improvement, but it still doesn't make for great casual chats.
This week, I’m checking out three tools that I think can make calls a bit less tedious and more productive. Let’s see if I convince the team to ditch Google Meets.
Plus: a free brilliant SEO extension our in-house expert guru, Cai, swears by, a simple hack to declutter your browser, and an eye-opening look at an AI “scam?” pulled off by a $70 billion corporation.
This newsletter is free thanks to our sponsor, Hostinger. By the way, I personally use a couple of their products (WordPress hosting, VPS for my n8n and domain names) 👇
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If you’ve ever walked out of a meeting and immediately forgotten half of what was discussed – since my twins were born this happens to me constantly – Otter.ai may be able to help. It’s an AI-powered transcription service that acts as your personal note-taker for every meeting, ensuring you never miss a crucial detail or action item again.
Otter.ai joins your meetings on platforms like Zoom, Google Meet, and Microsoft Teams and provides a real-time, searchable transcript. It automatically identifies different speakers, generates a concise summary of the key topics, and lets you highlight important points. After the meeting, you can easily search the entire conversation for keywords, share notes with your team, and assign action items.
I suppose the main drawback is that Otter records your conversations, which may make some people feel uneasy. Additionally, all of the paid plans come with a cap on the number of transcribed minutes you can use each month.
If you feel like your remote team is missing those spontaneous "coffee break" chats, Tandem is built to bring that feeling back – and I love the idea. It’s a virtual office that lets you see who’s around and jump into conversations with a single click – no more scheduling a 30-minute meeting to ask where that expenses file is in Google Drive. But you can also have the regular video calls if you want.
It creates a permanent space for your team where you can see who is online, join ongoing calls and spaces, or wave to a colleague to start a chat. It also integrates with over 100 apps, so you can collaborate directly in tools like Notion, Figma, or Google Docs. Of course you could find the constant "presence" a bit distracting at first, but it’s also a genuine attempt to bring us all closer.
We haven't fully switched to it – in fact, I am still trying to convince the team to give it a go. But based on what I’ve seen so far, I really like it, as I do at times feel a bit isolated working remotely.
Perfect for small teams that want to feel like they’re in the same room, even when they’re miles apart.
Ever been in a meeting where a barking dog, a screaming baby, or just loud cafe chatter makes it impossible to hear? Krisp AI started as a tool to solve exactly that, using AI to filter out background noise with incredible precision.
But Krisp has evolved into a full-blown AI meeting assistant. It still has its world-class noise cancellation, but now it also offers an AI-powered transcriber, automatic meeting summaries, and even an "AI Accent Localizer" – giving me some (positive) Black Mirror vibes.
While there’s no longer a free plan, you can test it out with a 7-day trial. The only downside is that the paid plan still limits your features (e.g. 60 minutes a day of accent localization) which might not be enough for those days packed with long meetings.
🛠️ Alternative to: Zoom noise cancellation, Otter.ai
We love mentioning other creators doing standout work, whether it is a smart idea, a practical newsletter, or content that helps you level up in some way.
This week’s pick is a newsletter full of thoughtful entrepreneur stories that both inspire and teach something new.
The Fake Mayo Newsletter
Discover how smart entrepreneurs got their first users or customers. Learn about the growth strategies working for them right now.
Doing on-page SEO analysis can be a pain, often requiring you to dig through a page’s source code or run a full site audit – I love old-geeky ScreamingFrog, but not sure everyone does. That’s why I was thrilled when our SEO expert, Cai, recommended the Detailed SEO Extension for Chrome.
This free extension gives you a comprehensive overview of any page’s on-page SEO elements in a single click. It neatly organizes everything from the basics like title tags, meta descriptions, and header structure to more advanced info like canonical tags, schema markup, and internal/external link counts. No more right-clicking to "View Page Source" and getting lost in a sea of code 🙈.
Cai uses it daily to spot on-page issues and opportunities on our sister site, EmailTooltester.com. It's an incredibly efficient way to get a quick, thorough SEO snapshot of any URL you're on.
For SEO pros, marketers, or anyone who wants to quickly check the SEO health of a page, this tool is an absolute must-have.
If your computer feels slow most of the time, your browser tabs might be the reason – Chrome gives me so much trouble with this. Even powerful M4 Macs hit a limit when dozens of unused tabs keep chewing through CPU cycles and memory.
Each tab runs small tasks in the background, from scripts to auto-refreshing content. The more tabs you keep open, the more power your browser wastes, and the less your computer can dedicate to the work you actually care about. That is why switching apps or running AI tools suddenly feels sluggish.
Useful fixes
The obvious one: close the tabs (or even entire windows) you are not using.
Use bookmarks to have pages stored and easily accessed.
Do restart your computer from time to time, it’s a good habit.
Use extensions like OneTab to declutter your browser and stop tabs from taking your computer’s memory.
Your computer is fast. It just needs fewer tabs fighting over its resources. A small cleanup goes a long way.
🍿 Plot Twist of the Week
We often hear about AI's incredible potential, but what happens when it goes completely off the rails? Consulting giant Deloitte found out the hard way in a case that cost them a whopping $440,000– and left a black mark on their prestigious reputation.
The firm was hired to produce a legal report and relied heavily on an AI tool to speed up the process. The problem? The AI "hallucinated," inventing entirely fake legal cases and precedents to support its arguments. The report was submitted, the client was billed, and it wasn't until later that the fabricated information was discovered.
The scandal has ignited a huge debate over professional responsibility in the age of AI. While Deloitte blamed a junior lawyer (classic), the incident is proof that you can't blindly trust what AI generates, especially for government reports 😭.
That’s it for this week. Thanks for reading! Next time, we're kicking off the holiday season early by sharing our hand-picked Black Friday deals on the best apps. You won't want to miss it.
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