Summaries for attendees

What it is

While a session is captioned, Summaries reads the captions as they arrive and keeps a short summary of what has been said so far, rewritten every few minutes and finished when that part of the session is over. An attendee reads it on the same phone they are already reading captions on, one tap away from the captions themselves. Each summary is written in the language being spoken and in the languages people in that room are reading at the time, up to six of them. Anyone reading in a language a summary was not written in sees it in the language spoken, with a line above it saying which language that is, the same way captions do when a meeting does not offer somebody's language.

A note about how it is made sits under every summary: it is written automatically from that session's captions, and it can get things wrong. Treat it as a fast way to catch up, not as the minutes of the meeting.

Turning it on, room by room and session by session

In the meeting's Settings, under Summaries, switch it on for the whole meeting or choose which rooms it runs in, the same way you choose which rooms caption at all. Choosing All rooms means every room in the meeting is summarised; choosing none means no room is, until you pick one or go back to All rooms.

Breaks, lunches and registration are summarised like any other session on your schedule. Once you have imported a schedule, the Schedule tab carries its own Summary column for each session, set to Follows the room, On or Off, so you can switch off the ones you do not want summarised, one session at a time, without turning the whole room off.

Depth has three settings, changed at any time from Settings: Brief is a paragraph. Standard is a paragraph and the key points. Detailed is the key points, decisions and numbers, questions raised, and terms worth knowing. A new depth is used by the next summary that starts. The summary being written now keeps the depth it began with.

What it costs

Summaries costs $9.00 per captioned hour, on any plan, on top of the captioned hour itself. It is included, at no extra charge, in the 3 captioned hours every account starts with free. See What counts as a captioned hour for how the rest of your bill is worked out.

What attendees see

A Summary sits beside the captions on a room's reader, showing what has been said so far while the session runs, marked Updated a few minutes ago, and Final once that part of the session is finished. If a summary has not started yet, the reader says so plainly rather than showing nothing.

Earlier today is always there. Anyone with the room's link can open it and read the finished summaries of earlier parts of the session they are sitting in, whatever the meeting allows about earlier ones. Turn on Attendees can read earlier sessions in Settings and a second list, Earlier sessions, appears beside it, holding the finished summaries of sessions that have already happened in that meeting, going back as far as the meeting goes.

A finished summary keeps the languages it was written in, so a session nobody was reading in your language at the time stays in the language spoken.

Hiding a summary

From the meeting's Dashboard, an operator can hide any finished summary. Attendees stop seeing it on their phones within a minute, and Show again puts it straight back exactly as it was. Hiding a summary never touches the session's captions or its transcript, only the summary readers see.