Task Extraction

After a meeting is transcribed, Pensum can read the transcript and pull out the tasks — the things people explicitly committed to doing. These land as ordinary task checkboxes in the meeting note’s ## Action Items section, indistinguishable from any task you’d type yourself. Today views, project dashboards, the Inbox — everything that surfaces your tasks picks them up automatically.

“Action Items” is the conventional heading meeting notes use for the to-do section. The things inside it are regular Pensum tasks — same syntax, same lifecycle, same everywhere else as anything you type by hand.

How to run it

1. Record the meeting (Cmd+Shift+R) and transcribe it
2. Open the meeting note (or its Meeting Page sidebar panel)
3. Click Extract Action Items

Pensum sends the transcript and your attendees list to the AI, parses the result, and appends a draft section to the meeting note.

What you get

## Action Items (Draft)

- [ ] Send pricing deck to client 📅 2026-05-16 (Jamie)
  > Source: [12:34] "I'll send the updated deck by Friday"

- [ ] Schedule follow-up with legal (Sam)
  > Source: [23:15] "Can you check with legal about the terms?"

Each extracted task includes:

Part	What it is
Checkbox	Standard - [ ] so Pensum’s task engine picks it up
Description	A concise, action-oriented restatement (not a verbatim quote)
Owner	Parenthesized name — pulled from the attendees list when the AI is confident, (unknown) otherwise
Due date	The standard 📅 YYYY-MM-DD Tasks emoji when a date was mentioned out loud
Source quote	The transcript timestamp and the actual phrase the AI extracted from, in a Markdown blockquote so it stays visible but doesn’t show up in task lists

These tasks behave like any other task in your vault — they appear in Today / Inbox / Project views, you can complete them with the right-click menu, drag them on the calendar, and so on.

Review before you commit

The section is labelled (Draft) intentionally. Skim the items, then:

• Keep what’s right — move the checkbox lines up into the main ## Action Items section (drop the (Draft) suffix). They keep working as tasks either way; the section move is purely organisational.
• Edit what’s close — fix names, dates, or wording inline. Standard Markdown editing.
• Delete what’s wrong — false positives happen, especially on noisy transcripts. Just delete the line. The source quote blockquote should go with it.

Once you’ve cleaned up the section, the tasks are part of your normal task graph — they show up in Today if their due date is today, in the inbox if they have no project tag, and so on.

What the AI is told to extract

The extraction prompt is deliberately conservative:

• Only explicit commitments. Someone has to say “I’ll do X” or “X needs to happen by Y” — not “we should think about X” or “X might be worth exploring.”
• Owner from context. The AI tries to match the speaker (when diarization is available) and the addressee against the attendees list. If it can’t pin down an owner, it writes (unknown) rather than guessing.
• No invented dates. A date only appears when it was said out loud. “By Friday” gets resolved to a real YYYY-MM-DD using the meeting’s date as the reference point.
• One source quote per task. Provenance is the contract — if you can’t trace a task back to the transcript line that produced it, the AI shouldn’t have created it.

Fewer false positives is better than catching everything. You’ll occasionally miss a soft commitment; that’s the trade-off.

Speaker identification helps

Action extraction works without speaker identification, but it’s much sharper with it. Run Identify Speakers first (also in the Meeting Page panel) so the transcript has named speakers instead of Speaker 0 / 1 / 2. The extraction prompt uses those names to pick owners.

For this to work, populate the meeting’s attendees: frontmatter before extraction:

attendees:
  - Jamie
  - Sam
  - Taylor

Re-running

You can run Extract Action Items again later — if you’ve edited the transcript, added attendees, or just want a second pass. A new ## Action Items (Draft) section gets appended each time. Trim the previous draft section first if you don’t want duplicate suggestions.

Provenance

Extracted tasks are marked AI-generated in Pensum’s internal index so the Today / Inbox / Activity views can apply the AI-content visual treatment you’ve set (subtle accent by default). The source quote blockquote also makes provenance visible in the file itself. You always know whether a task came out of your head or out of a transcript.