Meeting Action Item Extractor

When to invoke

• You have a meeting transcript and want a to-do list with owners and deadlines.
• You need consistent structure for feeding tasks into any project management system.

Inputs needed

• --transcript: plain-text transcript file.
• (Optional) --participants: JSON array of participant names to help owner matching.

Workflow

1. Read transcript and split into lines.
2. Detect action-item cues:
   • "action item", "AI:", "todo", "we should", "I'll", "I will", "can you"
3. Extract:
   • task: normalized imperative text
   • owner: inferred from speaker prefix (e.g., "Alex:") or matched participant name
   • due_date: parse simple natural phrases like "by Friday", "by 2026-06-01" (best-effort)
4. Deduplicate similar tasks.
5. Output JSON.

Output format

JSON:

• action_items: list of {task, owner, due_date, evidence}
• notes: parsing assumptions and any ambiguous items

Guardrails

• If owner or due date cannot be inferred confidently, set them to null and add a note.
• Do not fabricate tasks that are not present in the transcript.
• Evidence must quote the original line(s).

Reference code

extract_action_items.py