Picture Leila, an office manager. Wednesday evening, a quarter past nine. This afternoon's meeting is still in her head, and in a notepad full of half-finished sentences. Tomorrow, eight people want the report. She opens ChatGPT, types "write a report of this meeting" and pastes her notes. What comes out reads smoothly. Until she spots a decision nobody actually made.
Below you'll find what ChatGPT will and won't do for you, and how to stop it filling gaps that were never there.
What is ChatGPT good at when it comes to reports?
Anything to do with existing text. It turns loose notes into a structured report with headings, condenses a long transcript to the main thread and pulls out the decisions and action points, including who does what.
It makes the tone more businesslike and neutral, smooths out spelling and grammar, and sticks to a fixed format, the layout of your agenda for instance. That genuinely saves time. It just can't start until the text already exists.
What belongs in a good report is covered in writing a meeting report; going from rough notes to a polished version is covered in writing up meeting minutes.
Can ChatGPT record a meeting or transcribe audio?
Not the regular chat: it doesn't listen in and hears nothing of your conversation. One exception: since 2025 the macOS desktop app has had the Record feature on the paid plans (Plus and above). The feature isn't there in the browser, on Windows or on your phone.
Uploading an audio file is possible, with a few catches: there's a cap on file size (around 25 MB for audio uploads, see OpenAI's Audio API FAQ), there are no reliable speaker labels, and quality drops on long or messy recordings.
If all you want is a recording typed out neatly, read transcribing a conversation.
When does ChatGPT make things up in your report?
Mainly when your input is thin. It fills the gaps with details that sound convincing but were never said: a decision, a name, sometimes even a source. This is called hallucinating, and summaries are prone to it. In the research reported by Live Science, the AI hallucinated in 60% of cases when users asked questions about the reviews it had read, and over a quarter of the summaries shifted the tone of what reviewers had actually said.
The rule of thumb: the more complete the text you give ChatGPT, the less it invents. A full transcript produces a reliable summary; stray words invite invented decisions, and those read just as convincingly as the parts that are true.
It edits what you supply. It wasn't there.
What's a good prompt for taking minutes with ChatGPT?
Four things help. Supply a full transcript or complete notes, not stray words. Ask explicitly to use only what's there, and to leave gaps empty rather than fill them. Ask for a fixed structure: decisions, and action points with an owner attached. And afterwards, check the decisions and names against your source; that stays your responsibility.
A prompt that enforces it: "Turn the notes below into a report with a heading per topic, a list of decisions and a list of action points with an owner. Use only what's there. Invent nothing. If something is unclear or missing, write 'unknown' instead of filling it in."
Can a confidential conversation go into ChatGPT?
Better not, in the consumer version. Your input can be used for training, there's no data processing agreement, and the Autoriteit Persoonsgegevens, the Dutch data protection authority, treats pasting confidential data into a chatbot as a possible data breach.
With a business version plus a data processing agreement, or after anonymising, it's allowed. The full picture, consumer versus business, is on is ChatGPT GDPR compliant. Whether you're allowed to record the conversation at all is a different question; you'll find it on can you record a meeting.
Can you use ChatGPT for your report?
Three questions settle it. One: do you already have a transcript or complete notes? If not, ChatGPT can't do anything for you; capture the conversation first. Two: does it contain personal data? Then it depends on your version, see above.
Three: what do you expect from the result? Formatting or summarising text is fine, as long as you check the decisions and names against your source. If you want a reliable report from a spoken conversation, with no work afterwards, a tool that records, transcribes and summarises in one go is the better fit.
For plenty of text work, ChatGPT is a perfectly good choice: summarising a public report, rewriting your own rough draft, organising brainstorm notes. It falls short in one place: a spoken, confidential conversation you still have to capture. That's where all the limits meet.
When do you choose Notuly?
When the report has to come from a spoken conversation. In the room, your phone on the table is enough; online, you start the desktop app in Teams, Zoom or Google Meet. Hybrid works with a single recording: Daniël sits in the meeting room with the desktop app running, while Sam and Leila join online.
Within ten minutes the report, with the decisions and action points, is in everyone's inbox. It comes from the real conversation, so there's nothing to invent, and nobody has to check for gaps afterwards.
Underneath sits the privacy difference: the whole process, from speech to text to the summary, runs on our own AI on servers in Amsterdam. The audio is deleted within a minute of processing and your conversations are not used as training data. The data processing agreement is available on Team and above.