Amazon’s CTO, Werner Vogels, a man of considerable wealth who purchased the Airbnb in Central Amsterdam where he resided during the COVID-19 pandemic, dedicates his time to innovative projects. One such endeavor is an AI-powered application for summarizing meetings.
In a recent blog post, Vogels revealed details about Distill, an open-source application developed by his Office of the CTO (OCTO) team. Distill is designed to transcribe and summarize audio recordings from conference calls in various formats, including MP3, FLAC, and WAV. The app not only generates a concise summary but also compiles a list of actionable items. Furthermore, it offers the capability to integrate these summaries and lists into platforms like Slack through custom integrations.
Distill, an application developed under the aegis of Amazon’s CTO, predictably leverages Amazon’s extensive suite of paid products and services for its computational needs. The transcription functionality is handled by AWS Transcribe, storage is facilitated through Amazon S3, and the summarization tasks are managed by Bedrock, Amazon’s advanced generative AI development platform.
Given the plethora of existing tools designed to summarize meeting content, one might wonder why a new entrant like Distill was created. The rationale seems straightforward: given his substantial resources and interest in hobbyist programming, Vogels likely saw an opportunity. According to his blog, he is even experimenting with transitioning Distill’s codebase from Python to Rust—an endeavor that is certainly within reach for someone in his position.
A distinctive feature of Distill is its flexibility in allowing users to choose the AI model for generating meeting summaries. By default, it employs Sonnet, a mid-tier model from Anthropic’s Claude 3 series, likely influenced by Amazon’s significant investment in Anthropic. However, any model available on the Bedrock platform can be utilized, including those from Meta’s Llama 3 series and other models from startups like Mistral, AI21 Labs, and Cohere.
Vogels is candid about the fact that Distill is not infallible, acknowledging that AI-generated summaries can contain errors. “Remember, AI is not perfect,” he writes. “Some of the summaries we get back require manual adjustments. Nevertheless, it accelerates our workflow. This serves as a reminder that critical thinking and active involvement remain crucial.”
While one could argue that the necessity for human involvement in the summarization process undermines the purpose of an automated tool, Vogels remains an unwavering advocate for the technology his company develops. This steadfast support might well explain his enduring tenure as Amazon’s CTO.
