Summary
Writing Assistant and Conversation Summary are built-in generative AI features within Planhat
Use Writing Assistant to summarize text, extract action points, translate text, or even simply ask it to provide information. Then you can easily take action, e.g. send the generated text in an email
With Conversation Summary, you can summarize conversation threads (e.g. email chains) so you can quickly understand the key points without needing to read through long back-and-forth discussions
You consume AI credits in Planhat when you use these features
Who is this article for?
Anyone who would like to learn about Writing Assistant or Conversation Summary
Series
Planhat AI: Writing Assistant and Conversation Summary ⬅️ You are here
Article contents
Introduction
In today's busy world, everyone is looking for ways to be more efficient - you want to focus on value-adding, strategic actions that make the most impact, rather than spending large amounts of time carrying out admin tasks. Planhat's AI features can help make things quicker and easier, and in this article we will be focusing specifically on the "Writing Assistant" and "Conversation Summary" tools. These are native generative AI features within Planhat, which use Planhat's AI connection and therefore consume Planhat AI credits.
Writing Assistant
When you're having a meeting with a prospect or a customer, you'll typically be recording all your notes in Planhat. Making notes during a long call can result in a large amount of unstructured text that can then be time-consuming and tedious to read through - you can't quickly identify the main discussion topics or action points. Your rough notes probably make even less sense to any colleague of yours who needs to read them too. Manually sorting out the notes (restructuring etc.) would take time that you often don't have available.
Fortunately, Writing Assistant can help you quickly make sense of your notes - summarizing, finding action items, or even simply improving your writing. This makes your notes much more useful, both for you and any teammates who will also want to read about that meeting. Writing Assistant makes it easier for you to take action - in addition to identifying tasks, it also enables you to quickly send a follow-up email (e.g. to the relevant customers) using your generated text.
In addition, the Assistant can translate text (helpful if you need to share details with colleagues or customers in different countries) and can even answer general questions (so you can ask it for technical information during a meeting, for example).
Conversation Summary
If you have a long email or chat message thread, back and forth between you and a customer or prospect, it can be hard to get an overview. For example, perhaps you are a CSM about to have a meeting with one of your customers, and you need to quickly get up to speed with a complicated support ticket the customer has in progress. Or perhaps a Company's ownership is changing in Planhat (e.g. from one CSM to another, or from Sales to CS), and the new owner doesn't have time to read lots of long email chains to catch up with previous discussions.
The Conversation Summary feature solves this issue - simply click the "Summarize" button, and it will generate a summary of the conversation thread. After it's created, that Conversation Summary is then visible when you (or your colleagues) view that conversation, meaning it's easy to understand the big picture without needing to scroll through lots of individual messages. You can regenerate the Summary to update it if new messages are added to the thread.
In this article, we'll take a more detailed look at both of these features.
Writing Assistant
What is Writing Assistant?
Writing Assistant, also simply called "Assistant", is an AI tool built into Planhat that makes it quicker and easier for you to produce text - whether that's summarizing or extracting action points (task lists) from your rough meeting notes, translating text so it's better suited for your colleagues or customers, or simply improving your writing. You can even ask it questions - e.g. to quickly get information during a meeting.
Why use Writing Assistant?
Writing Assistant is very flexible, so it has a wide range of use cases. For example:
If the meeting notes you write during a customer call are a big block of stream-of-consciousness text ...
... you can use Writing Assistant to make them easier to read, for both yourself and colleagues ...
... and quickly identify action items without having to spend ages reading through a confusing wall of text and manually writing a separate to-do list ...
... saving you time, and making your work easier and less frustrating
If you have colleagues or customers around the world ...
... you can easily translate your notes into another language, so your teammates can keep fully informed ...
... and translate text for sharing with customers, such as via email, giving them the best possible experience
If you're in the middle of a meeting, and a customer mentions a technical or business term you're not familiar with ...
... you can ask Writing Assistant to provide information on it ...
... which gives you the knowledge you need quickly and easily - without having to leave Planhat
How to use Writing Assistant
When you're writing notes (logging an activity, using the Conversation model) or writing in the description of an Issue, you can highlight a piece of text, and select "Assistant".
You can then choose from a variety of pre-configured prompts:
"Improve Writing" - rewrite a piece of text in a structured and more comprehensible way
"Find Action Items" - create a to-do list
"Translate" - translate the text to the target language - currently supporting English, Spanish, French, German, Italian, Swedish, Portuguese, Russian, Polish, Chinese (Mandarin), Hindi, Arabic, Vietnamese, Korean, Indonesian and Filipino
"Summarize" - extract key details from the text in a concise way, without losing important information
... or you can even free-type into the Assistant if you'd like to use your own custom prompt, such as "write a follow-up email in Spanish".
🚀 Tip
As well as asking Writing Assistant to act on selected text, you can alternatively simply ask it for information, similar to how you might search online. So, for instance, while you're writing notes during a customer call, if your customer mentions an unfamiliar term, you can look it up without leaving Planhat. It's more advanced than a simple search, though - for example, if you need to quickly generate a meeting agenda at the start of a call, Writing Assistant can come to your rescue and make this for you.
To do this, rather than selecting text you've already written, simply type a forward slash ("/") and select "Writing Assistant", and then enter your query (e.g. "what is IBM Watson?").
Once the Writing Assistant has generated text for you, you can choose from a selection of pre-configured options to enable you quickly take action:
"Replace" - if you would like to swap your original text with the generated text - e.g. if you have used the Assistant to improve your writing
"Insert After Selection" - if you would like to add the generated text afterwards, perhaps because the Assistant has translated the text for you and you would like your note to contain both languages
"Send Email" - this opens up the email dialog panel, pre-populated with your generated text, which you can edit and send
"Regenerate Response" - you can use this option if you would like the Assistant to generate text again, for instance because you selected "Improve Writing" but (since this is a little subjective) the first response wasn't quite what you wanted, so you want to see the text written in another way
"Cancel" - self explanatory! Here you can exit the process if desired
Conversation Summary
What is Conversation Summary?
Conversation Summary is a helpful AI feature that lets you generate a quick summary of a long conversation thread (an email chain or a support chat with lots of back-and-forth messages), meaning you don't have to spend time reading every single message all to understand the key points.
Why use Conversation Summary?
Like Writing Assistant, Conversation Summary is a way that Planhat's native Gen AI features save you time by removing tedious manual work. It also reduces the risk that important information is missed because you didn't spot it buried within the correspondence.
Conversation Summary is particularly helpful if you weren't involved in a particular conversation - so you haven't seen the contents - but need to quickly know what's going on. For example:
You're a senior leader who's been brought in as an executive sponsor and you attend occasional meetings with a customer, perhaps because an issue has been escalated - you're busy and don't have time to read through a lengthy conversation thread, but you need to understand what's going on prior to a customer meeting
You're a CSM or TAM who's just been assigned an existing customer because the previous CSM or TAM has left your organization or is on vacation. You need to answer questions from the customer - perhaps on a call - but there is no time to review several very long email chains that have been ongoing with the customer recently
It can also be useful for your own conversations that occurred some time in the past - you can quickly and efficiently remind yourself of the contents using Conversation Summary.
How to use Conversation Summary
When you're viewing an applicable conversation, simply click on "Summarize", and Planhat's AI will read through the thread and summarize it for you.
If a Conversation Summary has already been generated for a conversation, you can click the "Open latest summary" button ...
... to view the Summary and see the date it was generated. Click "Summarize again" if you want to generate a new Summary if the existing one is out of date (e.g. you know there have been messages in the conversation since the Summary was created).
Considerations for Writing Assistant and Conversation Summary
Security considerations
These native AI features are powered by Planhat's connection to Vertex AI (Google Cloud's AI Platform) providing access to Gemini and Anthropic LLM models,
This means we (Planhat) have our own instance through Vertex AI, which lets us control data privacy and processing region. The input and output data is not available to third parties, and your data is not used to train models. If you're in the EU, your data is sent to instances in EU (adhering to data regulations in the region), or if you're in the US, you will use the US instance. Vertex AI does not store the requests or responses.
When you use the AI features listed above, a request is sent from the Planhat API to our own instance of Vertex AI, the request is processed, and the response is sent back to our API. Every step is encrypted through https.
Whether the response is automatically saved or not (in Planhat's database) depends on which feature you are using:
For Writing Assistant, the response is only shown to you, and is not saved to our database unless you choose to save it
For Conversation Summary, once we receive the response, we save it to the Planhat database to be able to show it again (when you want to view it at a later date) without reprocessing it
Commercial considerations
Writing Assistant and Conversation Summary use Planhat's Vertex AI connection, so these features use AI credits within Planhat.
You can read more about Planhat AI credits, including how to activate/purchase them for your tenant (organization), in our separate article, coming soon.
You can control the access of individual Planhat Users (your colleagues) to these features via workflow permissions in Roles. There are separate permissions for Writing Assistant and Conversation Summary, listed in the "Automation, AI and Workflow" category of workflow permissions, as shown below.
Additional resources
For an overview of all of Planhat's AI-related features, you can refer to:
"AI in Planhat" Help Center article
"AI in Planhat" video - this was made for original Planhat (app.planhat.com), but the principles remain the same