Send or Reset the Observer
Fixing one meeting, from the meeting itself.
Before You Begin
- A meeting with a joinable video link
- The Observer switched on for your organisation
- A working Google Meet connection
Open any meeting from the Meetings list and look for the Meeting Observer card. It tells you what the Observer is doing, and when it can, offers you a button to do something about it.
The button has two labels depending on timing, and they do different things:
- Reset Meeting Observer — on a meeting that has not started, or one where the Observer failed. It discards the existing Observer and schedules a fresh one for a minute before the start.
- Send Observer Now — on a meeting that is happening at this moment. It sends an Observer to join immediately.
Send Observer Now is the one worth knowing about in advance, because it is useful at exactly the moment you have no time to go reading documentation: you are two minutes into a call and realise nobody is recording it.
Steps
Open the meeting
From CRM → Meetings, click the meeting's title. The Observer card is in the right-hand column.
Read the status
The card shows a coloured banner with the Observer's state, and where relevant the time it is due to join.
Scheduled or Ready mean it is waiting. Joining and Joined mean it is arriving or present. Recording means it is capturing the call. Complete means it finished and the transcript is on its way. Error or Failed mean it did not manage to attend — that is when resetting is worth doing.
No observer assigned means nothing was ever scheduled for this meeting. Usually that is because the meeting has no Google Meet link, or had none when it was created.
Use the button
During the meeting the button reads Send Observer Now and the Observer joins as soon as it can — generally within a minute or so. The part of the conversation that has already happened is not recovered, so do it as soon as you notice.
Before the meeting it reads Reset Meeting Observer and schedules a new one for a minute before the start.
If the button is not there, the meeting has no joinable link, or it has already finished. A meeting that is over cannot be recorded retrospectively — but if anyone on the call recorded it, you can still supply that recording and get the full intelligence.
If it refuses, read what it says
The refusals are specific, and each one names its own fix:
- The Observer is switched off for this brand. Turn it on in Settings → Sales Settings → Meeting Settings, then try again.
- No meeting URL found. There is nothing to join. This meeting needs the Retrospective route instead.
- Meeting not found. The meeting record is missing, which generally means you have followed a stale link.
None of these are retried automatically, so nothing happens in the background after a refusal.
Result
The meeting has an Observer scheduled, or one on its way in.
From there it behaves like any other recorded meeting: the call is captured, transcribed, and processed according to your settings, and your debrief arrives afterwards.
If you sent the Observer partway through, the transcript covers from the point it joined. The intelligence is drawn from what it heard, so a debrief from a half-recorded call is a debrief of that half — worth remembering before relying on it as a complete record.
Warning: Resetting discards the existing Observer. On a meeting where one is already scheduled and healthy, resetting replaces it for no gain. Use it when the status is Error or Failed, or when something about the meeting has changed since the Observer was scheduled — not as a precaution.
Tip: A meeting under a minute long produces no intelligence. Very short conversations are kept as a transcript but not processed, because there is nothing in them to summarise honestly. If you sent the Observer in at the last minute of a call, expect the transcript and nothing else.
