Cvent App May End Bad Conference Notes And Blurry Screen Photos

Forbes

10-06-2025

AI-driven text capture and summarization technology from Cvent can replace most traditional ... More conference note-taking.
Picture this: You're sitting in a dimly lit conference room or convention ballroom, listening to a speaker who has something interesting to say. You are frantically scribbling notes while trying to photograph slides displayed on a distant screen. Later, back at your hotel, you're squinting at blurry photos and deciphering handwriting that looks like it was written during an earthquake. Sound familiar?
This frustrating ritual is repeated millions of times at business events worldwide. The good news is that it may finally be obsolete thanks to a breakthrough from event technology company Cvent. Today, I saw a new product in use at their annual Cvent Connect conference in San Antonio. In a packed ballroom with thousands of attendees, the company demonstrated a major advance in conference note-taking.
Cvent's new feature transforms the traditional note-taking experience through real-time speech transcription combined with intelligent content capture. Attendees can now see a live, accurate transcript of the speaker's words directly in the event app. Amazingly, there was virtually zero lag between spoken words and displayed text. Seeing the text appear as the words came out of the speakers's mouth seemed almost magical at first.
Here's how it solves most of the note-taking problem: instead of frantically writing illegible script, attendees simply tap a button when they hear something worth remembering. The system automatically captures not just that moment, but a full minute of the speaker's words.
"Instead of scribbling notes on a notepad, they're just clicking a button," explains McNeel Keenan, Cvent's VP of Product Management. "We capture the last 40 seconds, and since maybe that speaker hasn't finished their point yet, we're going to capture the next 20 seconds."
Raw transcripts aren't particularly helpful buried in a phone app weeks later. That's where artificial intelligence transforms captured content into something genuinely useful. The system automatically generates concise summaries of each captured segment and creates descriptive labels, eliminating the need for attendees to organize their own notes.
"We use AI to make it valuable for the attendee," Keenan notes. "We summarize what was in that minute and we give it a little label so they don't have to label their own notes."
The company plans to expand the feature to automatically capture whatever appears on screen when attendees hit the "snapshot" button—potentially ending the epidemic of blurry PowerPoint photos forever. No more stretching to photograph slides from the back of the room, or missing the slide completely because your phone went to sleep.
From an attendee experience perspective, Cvent's innovation addresses a classic friction point that most people considerd unavoidable. Conference note-taking has remained stubbornly analog, creating unnecessary effort and often disappointing results.
Writing notes and taking screen photos while trying to absorb complex information is far from ideal. The cognitive load of simultaneously listening, writing, and photographing content often means missing important nuances or connections.
By eliminating the mechanical aspects of most note-taking, the new system allows attendees to focus entirely on listening and engaging with content. The technology reduces the effort required while improving the quality of preserved information.
Early implementation at Cvent Connect demonstrated impressive technical performance. The transcription accuracy appeared remarkably high, even in a large venue with ambient noise, and the response time was virtually instantaneous.
"I was amazed at how fast it was," Keenan observed. "It was coming in like 2 to 300 milliseconds, right behind the speaker."
Perhaps more importantly, the system requires no additional effort from speakers or event organizers. Unlike previous attempts at presentation transcription that required speakers to use unfamiliar software or upload materials in advance, this event app-based solution works with any presentation style or technology setup.
The new technology will also simplify the dreaded 'summarize for the boss' or 'share the highlights with the team' phase of the event.
As Keenan explains, "When people get back to their office, they don't need to send a big email to their boss justifying the dollars they spent. They can share the key takeaways, they can share with their colleagues, and hopefully that'll be the reason that they get to bring two other colleagues next year."
It's easy to imagine the app or its output being used to further distill the notes into useful summaries, even podcast-like audio overviews to be shared or used to refresh one's memory. I'd personally feed them to a model like Claude to suggest applications for the ideas, identify quick wins, etc.
While the immediate benefit focuses on attendee experience, the technology creates something potentially more valuable: unprecedented insight into what actually resonates with audiences during presentations.
As a speaker, I know when I see lots of audience members raise their phones to capture one of my slides that I've said something that resonates. What I can't do is remember later which slides got the most interest, much less quantify that attention.
With this app, every time someone taps to save content, they're essentially voting for that moment as particularly valuable or interesting. This creates a real-time feedback loop that conference organizers and speakers have never had access to before.
This revealed preference data represents a significant advance over traditional post-event surveys, which suffer from poor response rates and recall bias. Instead sketchy reports from a few attendees about what they found valuable, organizers can see exactly which moments sparked enough interest to warrant saving.
The real test will be adoption and refinement of the technology as it scales beyond Cvent's own events. But for anyone who has ever returned from a conference with a collection of illegible notes and unusable photos, the promise is clear: better technology can preserve more value with significantly less effort.
In a follow-up article, I'll explore how this seemingly simple innovation could reshape conference programming and speaker selection through the unprecedented audience engagement data it generates.