Speak Meetings: AI in production, five years early.
AI meeting intelligence in production in 2018 — Microsoft and Google shipped equivalent features years later. This is what building AI products before the LLM era looked like.
Meeting intelligence before it had a name
In 2018 there was no commodity model you could call to transcribe a meeting, pull out the action items, and route them to the right people. If you wanted meeting intelligence, you built it: transcription, natural-language processing, and coordination logic, assembled from custom pipelines and made reliable enough for live use.
That is what Speak Meetings was — an AI-powered meeting intelligence platform, in production, years before the platforms made the category familiar.
No off-the-shelf anything
Every capability the product needed — speech-to-text quality, entity and action-item extraction, summaries a team would actually trust — had to be engineered from the NLP and ML tooling of the day and hardened against real meeting audio. Production AI without commodity models meant owning the whole pipeline: accuracy, latency, failure modes, and the product judgment about what to show users when the model was unsure.
The full loop, not a demo
- Automatic transcription — live meeting audio into usable text.
- Action item extraction — custom NLP pipelines identifying commitments and owners.
- Team coordination — meeting output routed into the follow-up work it implied.
- Production operation — a running service with real users, not a research prototype.
The market caught up; the IP lives on
The major platforms shipped equivalents years later. When commodity LLMs reshaped the market, the company was wound down and Date Palm Media acquired the IP to preserve it.
The experience did not wind down with it. Building production AI before LLMs is why we treat models as components to be engineered around — not magic — and it is the lineage behind our delivery work and our AI-native builds today.
Pre-LLM production AI
Check the claims yourself
- Archived 2018 product page for the platform’s assistant, via the Internet Archive: alfredbyspeak.com, October 2018 snapshot.
- Microsoft Teams intelligent recap and Google Meet AI notes launched publicly in 2023–2024 — public product timelines.
- Company fast facts on our press page; founder track record at josephdattilo.com.
We were early once. Now the tools are better.
If you are putting AI into a real workflow and need it to behave like production software, that is the job we have been doing since 2018.
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