What is Fireflies?
You may have heard about Fireflies.ai, it’s a note-taking app that uses a virtual assistant called Fred to help us get more from meetings, more easily. It transcribes and summarises meetings, allowing users to easily search and analyse voice recordings.
The product launched in 2020, so it’s been around a few years and has come to the fore as interest in AI apps for business has taken off. It can be used across all the major video conferencing platforms (Zoom, Teams, Google and more) and also integrates with CRM systems, dialling apps and many, many more types of software. You can also upload audio recordings to Fireflies, meaning you can have the productivity benefits for in person meetings too, as long as you make an audio recording of them.
How do I use Fireflies?
Once you’ve created an account and given Fireflies access to your calendar, ‘Fred’ (your automatic note-taker) will be invited to your meetings. You can also invite Fred by sending a calendar invite to [email protected].
(N.B. depending on which video conferencing platform you use, there may be additional admin settings needed to allow Fred to join. There are full instructions on the Fireflies help pages.)
Once the meeting has finished, Fireflies will begin processing the audio it’s captured. When you log in to Fireflies, you can check your Notebook to see if a meeting has finished processing. You will also get an email notification when it’s ready.
Fireflies will automatically send a summary of the meeting by email that includes an overview and highlights insights like how many questions were asked or how many actions recorded. If you click through you may be able to see more information, depending on your subscription level with Fireflies (some insights are reserved for higher subscription levels).
When you log in via your dashboard, you’ll have access to three views for each meeting:
- Transcript – a typed transcript of the whole meeting
- Summary – a short summary that gives an overview, keywords and actions
- Sound bites – short audio clips that capture key moments
You can download the transcript and summary as word documents, ready to share with anyone else who needs them.
Use cases and benefits for businesses
Fireflies allows you to get more from your meetings, with less effort from your people, therefore making everyone more productive.
It removes the need to take notes by recording and transcribing what was said in a meeting. It then goes further, using conversational AI to pull out the most important information from the discussion.
Use it to:
- Record tasks and actions for specific team members
- Analyse the data and answer questions about the meeting
- Identify keywords and topics discussed in your meetings
- Track key metrics like sentiment of the discussion or number of filler words
- Identify information on competitors, objections and other topics you can customise
It integrates with many platforms and apps, meaning you can also use it to:
- Create or add to your CRM system records
- Create tasks in your project management software with voice commands
- Instantly share meeting notes to collaboration software like Slack or Notion
- Save time on recruitment by easily sharing candidate briefs between first and second interviewers, plus it’s useful for generating second interview questions
Fireflies hints and tips
We find that Fireflies is generally good at separating the chat from the main business of the meeting. However, it isn’t infallible. Below, we’ll share what we’ve found works while using it and what doesn’t.
Content Topics
- The way Fireflies picks out the main topics from normal conversation is useful, giving you a ready made summary of the key points.
- The usual start of meeting chit-chat is generally left out of the summary document, so the notes get straight to the point.
- If Fireflies is ever a little overzealous in what its summary ignores, you also have the full transcript which captures everything that was said.
Recording actions
- We were pleased to find that Fireflies picked up actions whether we made a point of saying “Here’s an action for X to do Y” as well as when they were just part of a normal conversation, for example “X, can you let me know when Y is complete?”
- Fireflies picked up all the actions for people who were named as guests, and non guests who we mentioned by name more than once. Fred helpfully lists them all by person, so they’re easy to recap.
- There were other actions we tried for people who were only mentioned by name once that weren’t picked up at all, so we recommend being very clear about naming who is going to do what.
Insights
The AI generated summary and actions is already useful for improving efficiency, as no one needs to make notes and then take time to summarise them after the meeting. Actions can be shared swiftly, leaving no one in doubt what’s been agreed.
Another level of productivity, however, can be achieved by using insights. The information Fred captures about your meeting can be queried later, as easily as asking a team member. You (and your team) don’t have to keep it all in your heads or trawl through pages of notes.
Particularly for business owners and senior staff, we found this significantly frees up mental energy. It also frees up time spent answering questions from team members about the meeting, as you can direct them to ask Fred. What could you do with the extra time and head space this would give you?
How to use it: from your dashboard, you can ‘Ask Fred’ questions about the meeting and get an analysis based on the recording. This allows you to generate insights about meetings much faster than you could manually.
The responses are thorough, and Fireflies gives a short explanation of how it came to its conclusion. We tried questions like:
- What actions were agreed for [insert project, topic or activity]?
- What are the timelines for [insert project, topic of activity]?
- What did [name] say about [topic]?
- Who received the majority of the actions?
- What was the tone of the conversation?
- What was agreed about [topic]?
- What is the most urgent thing to follow up after this meeting?
Depending on your subscription, you can also search for keywords highlighted by Fireflies and find where they are mentioned in the transcript.
How can I get Fireflies for my business?
If you’d like to get Fireflies, so you and your people can start enjoying the productivity benefits, follow this affiliate (paid) link.
You can find out more about Fireflies by watching our recent Fireflies webinar.