Breath Sports Meeting Room: AI that turns meetings into sports

Meetings tend to consume a lot of time. From orientations to presentations, there are various types of meetings, but brainstorming sessions are particularly time-consuming. Awkward silences drag on when good ideas don't surface, leading to the decision to reconvene next time... Many of you have likely experienced this.

That's why we wondered: Could AI technology help energize meetings? Brainstorming Sports. Shortened to "Brespo."

This time, we introduce one of Dentsu Inc.'s AI-powered initiatives: the "Brespo Meeting Room."

Using Gamification to Motivate Participants

While many initiatives already incorporate AI into meetings, most focus primarily on "efficiency." However, efficiency alone rarely motivates people to take action. Therefore, to fundamentally change how people perceive meetings, we incorporated the concept of gamification.

Our goal was to develop a service that energizes "meetings designed to generate ideas." Considering AI support for idea generation, hacking into existing thinking frameworks seemed the most efficient path. Various idea-generation frameworks and methods have been developed over time, such as the "KJ Method" and "Design Thinking."

While evaluating these, we found that "brainstorming" – emphasizing quantity over quality and encouraging free expression – seemed particularly compatible with AI. We then developed a concrete vision and collaborated with Pyramid Film Quadra to create "Brespo Meeting Room."

It visualizes participants' comments in real-time via voice recognition and scores their contribution to the meeting using natural language processing. This allows meetings to unfold like a tennis or ping-pong rally, where participants enjoy the back-and-forth exchange of ideas.

 

AI judges the positivity of comments! How to play with the Breespo Meeting Room

① Participants first put on their headsets and take their seats.

② Select a topic for brainstorming. The meeting starts when all participants say "Please!"

③ When someone has an idea, they say "Breathpo!" to get the floor. They then speak their idea aloud, and the content is displayed on the screen via voice recognition.

④ Other players respond with their thoughts on the idea. The Breathpo Meeting Room AI then judges whether the response is positive or negative. If positive, points are added to the idea. Conversely, if negative, adhering to the brainstorming principle of "not negating others," points are deducted from the player who gave the negative response.

Ideas' scores are tallied within the time limit. The player who voices the most ideas and earns the highest score wins. All ideas voiced remain as data and can be taken back as meeting minutes.

Ideas are presented in a brainstorming-style sticky note design. Higher scores make the sticky notes progressively larger.

The core mechanism of the Brespo meeting room is AI-powered speech recognition and text mining. Text mining refers to the system that analyzes the content of the statements.

Current speech recognition technology, including Siri on iPhones, has already reached practical levels. Many IT companies now provide speech recognition APIs, which Breespo Meeting Room utilizes. Additionally, participants wear individual headsets to identify who is speaking.

For text mining, we prepared a large volume of phrases likely to appear during meetings. We trained the system using data labeled as positive or negative, and this is used for scoring judgments.

Moving forward, we are considering introducing an automated scoring system using the latest natural language processing algorithms like BERT(※). This system would assign higher points to speakers who use words not previously encountered in the data.

※BERT
A cutting-edge natural language processing model using deep learning developed by Google's AI team
 

Furthermore, AI could potentially assist with idea generation during meetings. For example, in brainstorming sessions for advertising concepts, if the AI is pre-trained on award-winning ad campaigns, it might suggest, "What if we combined these elements? Could that spark a new idea?"

Those who have actually experienced Breathpo have given us a lot of positive feedback, such as "It's easy because I don't have to take notes" and "The idea of making meetings more casual is interesting."

As socially impactful AI initiatives grow, Breespo's concept of positively transforming participants represents a Dentsu Inc.-style AI application guideline. If you're interested in Breespo meeting rooms, feel free to inquire.

AI MIRAI Official Website: https://aimirai.ai