DEV Community: Benji AI

Communication Culture

Benji AI — Sun, 09 Oct 2022 20:12:40 +0000

How do you and your company think about communication and the culture around it? Especially curious as more people move to remote or hybrid models. I've found that a lot of companies do interesting things like:

Ensure you always talk in public channels
Recording Zoom meetings and making them public
Always taking meeting notes

What does your company do?

You Should Start Recording Your Zoom Meetings

Benji AI — Sun, 09 Oct 2022 05:49:35 +0000

Introduction

If you're a manager, there's a good chance that you've started using Zoom to facilitate video meetings. And if you haven't yet tried it out, you should! But maybe not for the reasons that everyone else does. I'm talking about the ability to share your screen with others and collaborate on documents together in real time. These features make Zoom excellent for team collaboration and project discussions, but they also mean that it's easy to get distracted from what really matters in most meetings—participation by all attendees. If your company has been trying to transition from written meeting notes into something more effective like video conferencing or Slack messaging, then consider adding recording functionality as a way to increase participation while preserving documentation of decisions made during meetings.

At Benji AI, we're working on using the information in these meetings to start growing your organization's information repository. When Benji starts to gain context about your business and what's happening day-to-day, Benji can help eliminate tribal knowledge and unblock team by answering questions automatically. If you're curious to try Benji AI, sign up here: https://benjiai.xyz.

Now, what are the benefits of recording Zoom meetings?

You can make meetings asynchronous

Zoom meetings are ideal for remote workers. You can join a meeting from anywhere, and you can even record the meeting from anywhere. If you couldn't attend a Zoom meeting in person or if there was no way to send audio or video out of a location, you could still get the info by recording your participation in the meeting. This is especially useful if there were important decisions made during that particular meeting, and you want to know how everyone voted before moving forward with any action items.

You'll also notice that there's an option when recording your own voice on Zoom: "I am speaking." That means you'll be able to hear yourself talk throughout the session as other people speak—and since this isn't necessarily something we're used to hearing ourselves say out loud (especially when we're not using headphones), it gives us another opportunity for self-awareness about what comes across as confident versus insecure/nervous/uncomfortable when engaging with others via video conferencing software like Zoom!

You can share the meeting with others who couldn't join

If you miss someone's call, you can send them an invite to join a Zoom recording.

If there's a time zone difference between the host and other participants, they can all watch when it suits them best (and vice versa).

You can have a record of what gets said and decided

Recording your Zoom meetings is a great way to have a written record of what gets said and decided. This can be particularly useful if you're part of a team that's spread out across the globe and can't all be in one room at once. If there are some things that need to be discussed further, or if there's something that needs to be referred back to later on, then having a recording will let you get everyone on the same page. It's also nice because it keeps those who couldn't attend up-to-date with what happened during their absence - whether they were busy with another meeting or just didn't want to come along! In addition, other people outside of your organization may find recordings helpful too; for example: customers who are looking into purchasing new technology services.

It lets you concentrate on participation during the meeting

Recording the meeting allows you to focus on participation during the meeting, so that you can be more productive and engaged.

Recordings are also a great way to review what happened in your meeting!

It's a way to document decisions and action items

Recording your Zoom meetings is a great way to document decisions and action items. It’s also a way to prove that you made a decision, followed up on something, or took an action item.

When you record your meeting, it helps you remember what was decided.

It can be used as proof of what was decided (especially if there are multiple people involved).

You can refer back to the recording later if there are any questions about what happened during the meeting or why some decisions were made.

It's a way to prove your contributions to a project

Recording your Zoom meetings is a great way to prove your contributions to a project, especially if you have to work with someone who doesn't believe you. It's also helpful in situations where another person claims they did something that you didn't see, but that they want credit for doing. Plus, if the deadline for submitting a report or final product is coming up and everyone else has done their part except for one person (or maybe several), recording the meeting may be the only way to get him or her on track.

Recording meetings is an important accessibility feature

Recording meetings is an important accessibility feature. This can help people with disabilities, including visual impairment, hearing loss or deafness, mobility issues and learning disabilities. Video recording also allows for DeafBlind persons to access information in real-time by having another person read the screen text aloud as it's being displayed on screen.

Start recording Zoom meetings.

You should start recording your Zoom meetings.

It's a good idea to record meetings, and it's easy for you to do so with just a few clicks. Recording allows you to remember what was said in the meeting and also helps ensure that everyone who participated fully understands what was agreed upon during the session. When it’s time to follow up on action items or decisions made during the meeting, this is especially helpful. You can also share recordings with colleagues who couldn’t attend in order for them to learn more about what happened during their absence from the conference room (and avoid getting caught off guard by any surprises).

Conclusion

Recording meetings is an important accessibility feature, it allows people who can’t attend a meeting in person to participate, and it gives everyone a record of what was said. Recording meetings is also good for documentation, so they can be referred back to later on if necessary—for example, if you ever need to prove how much work you did on a project or provide evidence that things were discussed during the meeting.

A New Way to Do Technical Documentation

Benji AI — Sat, 08 Oct 2022 00:16:43 +0000

After 15 months of development, we’re thrilled to finally unveil Benji AI. You can sign up for Benji here: https://benjiai.xyz.

Benji AI was born from our belief that the most important thing for an engineering team to move quickly is having great documentation. We know it’s not glamorous — but it’s critical to unlocking engineering productivity, particularly in companies with remote, hybrid, or async cultures.

We surveyed almost a hundred engineers about what they thought was the most frustrating part of their day, and the overwhelming response was: lack of great documentation. Poor documentation prevents engineering teams from moving at their fastest, and engineers are often spending hours each week answering questions or getting their questions answered. Additionally, existing solutions don’t cut it. Finding the right documentation is extremely challenging — just ask anyone that’s used Confluence wikis or Google Docs for technical documentation. A lot of companies try StackOverflow for Teams but it always fails to get adopted. Instead, engineers prefer asking and answering questions in Slack or Teams instead.

That’s why we created Benji AI: a platform that automatically answers your questions and helps you quickly generate great documentation. Benji constantly absorbs information across your company from sources like pull requests, codebase, internal wikis, Zoom meetings, and Slack. Our goal is to minimize the amount of time engineers are asking questions and maximize the amount of time building features to delight customers.

Benji AI comes in multiple forms. The first is a Slack app which automatically answers questions in Slack for you if it knows the answer. If not, it’ll find and link relevant wikis, PRs, Zoom meetings, or Slack threads where the question might be answered, with additional context. Benji will also help you find the right people to ask. If you don’t want to ask a question in a public channel, you’re also welcome to DM Benji directly!

The second is a Zoom meeting assistant. We found that a lot of the context that happens in Zoom meetings (from formal meetings, to ad-hoc debug sessions, to explaining system architecture) goes undocumented or is poorly documented. Additionally, Zoom recordings don’t cut it — engineers strongly prefer reading documents as opposed to watching a Zoom recording. In an effort to ensure the information is preserved and can be easily consumed, Benji will take your meeting notes, create a shareable document out of it, and absorb the information to help answer questions in the future.

Finally, there’s the Benji desktop app. Not all contextual information happens in public Slack channels. In fact, a lot of important Q&A happens in Slack DMs. Benji has a screenshot tool that helps you document this information while maintaining the privacy of your Slack DMs. Just hit Cmd+Ctrl+S to screenshot your Slack DM or Slack thread and Benji will automatically absorb the information inside the screenshot and document it so that others can find it.

We’ve been using Benji internally for several months now and it has enabled our engineering team to move much faster — particularly so because we are a remote, async team. We hope that you too can supercharge your engineering team’s productivity with Benji. Benji AI is still in beta but we are rapidly onboarding new teams. If you’re interested in trying out the product, sign up here! We promise it will blow you away.