Using AI to turn meeting notes into follow-up emails in minutes

Executive overview

Most professionals spend three or more hours a day on email. Follow-up emails after meetings are a major driver of that time. Feeding a meeting transcript or handwritten notes into a customised AI project cuts first-draft time from hours to minutes.

A well-crafted system prompt plus a transcript or photo of notes is all that's needed to produce accurate, personalised follow-up emails.

Setting up the AI email writer

• Use a Claude Project or custom GPT — these act as a themed chatbot with a fixed system prompt and optional knowledge base
• The system prompt gives the AI a persona, writing style rules, and extraction instructions
• Key style rules: fifth-grade reading level, mix of short and medium sentences, sign off as the sender
• XML tags (for Claude) or Markdown delimiters (for ChatGPT) separate user input from image/PDF content inside the prompt
• A reminder block at the end of the prompt reaffirms the most important instructions

Drafting emails from a meeting transcript

• Record meetings and export the transcript; paste it directly into the project chat
• Use voice dictation to describe what you want — no typing needed
• Specify the recipient, the purpose, and any action items to surface
• The AI ranks and prioritises topics, extracts action items, and surfaces meta-insights from the conversation
• Output requires only minor edits before sending

Drafting emails from handwritten notes

• Take a photo or export a PDF of handwritten notes and upload it
• The AI reads even poor handwriting and extracts the core content
• Accuracy in testing: roughly 60–70% of handwritten content captured correctly
• Improve accuracy by explicitly naming the items you want extracted in your dictation
• The same workflow applies to any image or PDF source

What the system prompt controls

• Persona and sign-off name
• Writing style (reading level, sentence length)
• Email structure (opening, body, close)
• Extraction behaviour for images and PDFs
• Response format when replying to an existing email thread