FirefliesAI: meeting audio to searchable notes

Fireflies.ai turns meetings into notes.

Fireflies.ai records and transcribes meetings, and automatically turns them into searchable, collaborative notes. The startup’s virtual assistant, adorably named Fred, hooks into Google Calendar so that it can automatically join an organization’s Zoom, Meet or Skype calls. As it listens in, it extracts useful notes and information which it can forward to appropriate people in the organization through integrations like Slack and Salesforce. Zach Winn for MIT News:

“[Fred] is giving you perfect memory,” says [Sam] Udotong, who serves as Firelies’ chief technology officer. “The dream is for everyone to have perfect recall and make all their decisions based on the right information. So being able to search back to exact points in conversation and remember that is powerful. People have told us it makes them look smarter in front of clients.”

As someone who externalizes almost everything I need to remember into an (arguably overly) elaborate system of notes, calendars and to-do apps, I almost feel like this pitch is aimed directly at me. I haven’t had a chance to try it out yet, but I’m hoping to give it a shot on my next lunchclub.ai call (if my match is up for it, of course).

Fireflies is not alone, though. It looks like this is becoming an competitive space in productized AI, with Descript (DT #18, #24), Microsoft’s Project Denmark (#23), and Otter.ai (#40) all currently working on AI-enabled smart transcription and editing of long-form audio data. Exciting times!