Fireflies.ai is a meeting assistant that records and transcribes your calls, then turns them into notes you and your team can search. You can send its note-taker bot to a video call, let it join automatically from your calendar, or record locally through a desktop app, browser extension, or phone. It is built for teams whose knowledge gets trapped in calls — sales, recruiting, research — and for anyone who wants a reliable record without typing during the conversation.
What it does beyond a transcript
After a meeting you get a summary, action items, and a full transcript with speakers separated. Search reaches back months, so "what did they say about budget in the spring?" is answerable, and an assistant named Fred can answer questions across your meetings. Because it is pitched at teams, there is more analysis than a basic note-taker: talk-time per speaker, sentiment and topic tracking, and the ability to push notes into CRMs, project tools, and Slack. Custom "skills" can extract specific details, like scoring a candidate or drafting a follow-up email.
Setting it up sensibly
Decide up front where you want it to run — bot in the call, local recording, or both — and add a line to your invites so people know. Connect it to the tools where the notes are actually needed, or they will pile up unread. After a call, skim the summary and correct names and numbers; a transcript is a draft. Teams should also pick retention settings deliberately rather than by default, and agree on who can read which meetings.
What to keep in mind
Automatically recording colleagues and clients raises consent and data-protection questions, and a bot visibly joining can change how freely people talk, so don't hide it. Accuracy varies with audio quality, accents, and crosstalk; verify anything that matters. Free and paid tiers differ in features and limits, and this changes, so check the official Fireflies site.
If you prefer a bot-free recording option, see our Otter.ai overview. To automate what happens after a meeting, read about Zapier AI. Our AI tool guide can help you decide.
