For example Teams and Outlook have terrible search. Documents basically go into a black hole to never be seen again. We need the same search quality we have for web searches.

that's why you shouldn't use _either_ of those as repositories of information ... they're great for the ephemeral discussions, but once consensus is reached, you should have other ways of tracking that, whether it's: github/devops/jira issues and tickets, or some kanban board somewhere, or design documents, or a wiki. The discussion itself shouldn't be the artifact that records the decision.

Debian uses something called Meetbot. It seems like it would be sort of be what you are asking for.

https://wiki.debian.org/MeetBot

Good suggestions for improvement, but I don't think they fit this context. Face-to-face communications are extremely unsearchable.

Interesting

[edit: lost context after parent edited]

What I can think of is a smartphone app that's always listening and transcribing, best-effort, all it listens. This can capture in person speech and make it searchable.

Also, are any of the current videoconferencing options offering machine transcribing out of the box? I know users could always hand-feed recorded video to a separate tool, but ease-of-use matters.

Emulating face-to-face-ness remotely is precisely the hard problem. As pg once said, the real world is incredibly high-bandwidth.

There are tools like automatic captions + manual tagging that can make search much better. The tools are out there, just not well adopted at this point.