Here’s my detailed breakdown after using Fireflies.ai for an entire month across 33 video calls (Zoom, Meet, and Teams).

I run a small Marketing Agency and Creator business as most of you know and spend 1–4 hours/week in meetings. I needed a tool to auto-record, transcribe, and ideally summarize those meetings without wasting time rewatching.

Quick Summary (for those skimming):

• ✅ Best feature: automatic call join + summary bullets

• 📉 Worst part: speaker mislabeling during fast conversations

• 🧠 Final verdict: If you do >10 meetings/month, Fireflies is a no-brainer

What I tested:

• Fireflies.ai (Pro plan)

• Otter.ai (Premium)

• MeetGeek (free trial)

• Test duration: 30 days, 33 meetings

• Meeting types: sales, client onboarding, internal syncs

What Fireflies.ai did exceptionally well:

• Auto-joins meetings with zero manual setup

• Summary bullets were 90–95% accurate in my testing

• Search by keyword or speaker — found stuff in seconds

• Pushes summaries to Slack + Notion (my favorite feature)

• Audio + video file storage, easy to reference later

What Fireflies could improve:

• Multi-speaker labeling wasn’t always accurate

• Transcripts took 10–15 min to appear after longer calls

• Best AI features are gated behind the Business plan

Real-World Results After 30 Days

Fireflies vs Otter vs MeetGeek

Final Verdict:

Would I keep using Fireflies.ai? ✅ Already upgraded.
Would I recommend it? ✅ 100% if you take 5+ meetings per week.
Is it worth $18/mo? ✅ Yes — saves me ~3 hours/week and keeps my follow-ups sharp.

TL;DR – Fireflies.ai in 30 Seconds:

• 🔎 Automatically joins and records Zoom/Meet calls

• ✍️ Transcribes and summarizes with impressive accuracy

• 📤 Integrates with tools like Slack, Notion, CRMs

• 🧪 Outperformed Otter and MeetGeek in my direct test

• 💸 Paid tier is worth it if you run frequent calls

Click here to try Fireflies.ai (Free Trial)

Happy to answer questions — I kept detailed notes across all 3 platforms. AMA.

Any insights or tips on which is better or you get more bang for your buck?

Just for context, I’m using a macbook and we are using clickup, google meet, and zoom.

Thank you!!

I'm using Otter and like it, but I hear some people like Fireflies better.

The use case is 1) attending meetings with me and creating notes I can chat with after.

Has anyone ever used this app to record meetings and help them write minutes? Would you recommend? Thanks!

I've been in more and more meetings with people in the private sector who are summarizing online meetings with fireflies.ai, and it's pretty awesome. Do we have anything similar approved for use within the BCPS?

Following AI tool everywhere, companies integrate summarieser and note taker tool for meeting. These services store recorded data has typical "privacy-policy".

I don't know how helpful these services are for them. But, it's not cool to give data of every person they interview to such services and store the data as long as they want.

The company says, we will not turn it off. I choose privacy over these shiny job opportunities.

Edit: Ain't got no luxury to turn down job but I'm going to until I can.

FYI - I am looking for DevOps or Security role in India. Yes. The country where unemployment and under-employment is a major issue for long time.

We have a few users who tested out fireflies.ai under their accounts and we can't seem to remove it from auto attaching itself to meetings their apart of. I've gone into the individual users and removed fireflies from their connected applications and it's still popping up. I'd like to find a way to remove and then block fireflies completely. I'm assuming thats possible but not finding where I can do that.

This is mostly a rant, but also a security warning to you all: Be wary about AI notetakers. They don't seem to care about privacy or HIPAA or anything like that. Once they latch on to your account, they take part in EVERYTHING they can and spread like viruses to other meeting attendees.

I'm getting more and more clients submitting tickets that they joined some Zoom/Teams meeting where someone else had a notetaker, and now the notetaker is joining all this person's meetings and they don't know how to stop it. They didn't create an account with the AI thing, or at least don't think they did, and now have no clue how to get rid of the thing. And now I'm stuck trying to figure out how to disconnect it from their MS/Zoom/Google accounts. These things are the new viruses, I swear...

In the most recent case, the poor guy has otter.ai AND read.ai that are joining Zoom meetings that he joins even though he hasn't created accounts for either of the AIs OR for Zoom. And it's the same story: "I joined a meeting where someone else had it, and now it won't leave me alone!"

I lead a PMO at a web development agency and I've been tasked with doing a platform assessment for a few AI note-taking / meeting assistants.

Both Sembly and Fireflies look to be really great options for our organization and seem like they would be great for sending meeting summaries and capturing notes for our delivery teams after calls.

Does anyone here have experience leveraging these kinds of tools? What did you like? What would you consider when making this assessment? Do you have any thoughts or recommendations? Thanks in advance!

My team uses fireflies but its created a new problem. We have accurate transcripts that nobody acts on. The notes are isolated from our project management tools.

I am looking for an alternative that focuses on action, not just archives. Key needs are accurate transcription and meeting summaries, automatic task detection and creation from discussion and ability to assign those tasks and sync them to a project management platform.

Does a tool exist that truly bridges the gap between meeting conversation and actual execution?

Hi

We're thinking of implementing Fireflies AI, which is a note taking tool you can add to may online meeting platforms.

It transcribes the meeting for you, summarises the topics covered and let's you search the recording for things such as questions or when dates may be mentioned (such as deadlines).

One thing it claims to do is analyse speakers. It listens to the recording and it can tell you who speaks the most, and who said what (in transcript format). I'm no biometrics expert but I assume it would need a sample and a probe in order to do this?

My initial thought was that this type of voice recognition and attributing it back to a person would be classed as biometrics. Fireflies leave a lot to be desired when it comes to their general data protection/security assurances so I can't actually tell how it works.

There is a separate headache in that if this is biometrics it engages Art 9, where the only basis applicable would be explicit consent. However, as an employer we'll never rely on employee consent, which would seemingly leave us stranded in terms of lawful basis. This would apply to almost all controllers though who wish to use biometrics with their employees.

Any help and guidance would be appreciated.

Has anyone experienced a random attendee with no pic and the username “Firefly.AI Notetaker”? I know it’s an AI company, can’t figure out their purpose or how they found our meeting.

Curious to know if it's worth enrolling my company in the reseller program.

Merry Christmas y'all! This is a sequel to my last post where I discussed the tech behind PDF.ai and ChatPDF.

Why "copy"? The best SaaS products weren’t the first of their kind - Slack, Shopify, Zoom, Dropbox, and HubSpot didn’t invent team communication, e-commerce, video conferencing, cloud storage, or marketing tools; they just made them better.

What are AI scribes and note takers?

They’re AI-powered assistants that record, transcribe, and analyze conversations in real time. These tools will identify the speakers, summarize key points, extract insights, and trigger actions on your behalf. AI scribes and note takers eliminate the need for note-taking and processing, and enable you to focus fully on discussions - whether in meetings, lectures, interviews, or consultations!

Let's look at the market!

Built with a mix of speech recognition, speaker diarization, and (of course) LLMs, AI scribes and note takers started gaining traction in early 2023 and have seen consistent growth in market interest, currently at an all-time high (source):

Phrases like "scribe AI" and "AI note taker" see 10k–100k monthly searches (source: Google Keyword Planner). While AI “Note takers” and “Scribes” are technologically synonymous, they appeal to different audiences:

Note takers like Fireflies and Otter cater to broad markets, automating meeting notes and triggering workflows for sales, management, and recruiting. They also transcribe and analyze notes for educators, content creators, doctors, and other professionals. Fireflies and Otter have ~15M users each, with business plans around $30/seat.

Some note takers will target niche markets and use more specific terminology. For instance “Scribe”, an existing job title in healthcare, makes sense for healthcare note takers. Currently “AI medical scribe” gets 1–10k Google hits compared to just 1–10 for “AI medical note taker.”

There’s a rising market adoption for healthcare note takers, which help record clinical sessions and generate SOAP notes for therapists, vets, and physicians. For example, Scribenote is used by 1000+ Vets and charges ~$249/month, and Sunoh has over 60K physicians, starting at ~$1.25 per consultation.

Alright, so how do we build this quickly?

Most note-takers work with three layers:

1. Recording: Captures the conversation, either natively on the device (Mac/IOS/Android/Windows/linux all have native libraries for this) or via a microservice (e.g., via recall.ai) that records online meetings over Zoom, Google Meet, or Teams.

2. Speech Recognition and Diarization: Transcribes the speech, and labels the speakers (if omitted by recorder) in the conversation. This can be done either by combining an open source ASR model like Whisper-v3-Turbo with Pyannote for speaker diarization (Huggingface ASR list), or via API (Google Speech / Amazon Transcribe).

3. Text analysis: An LLM (e.g., Llama, ChatGPT) is prompted to analyze the entire transcript and generate relevant insights.

Here are some of the best open source projects to execute this pipeline:

• Meeting Bot Started Kit by Zoom

• noScribe by Kaixxx

• Scriberr by Rishikanth C.

• Live Meeting Assistant Sample by AWS

Worried about building signups, user management, payments, etc.? Here are my go-to open-source SaaS boilerplates that include everything you need out of the box:

• SaaS Boilerplate by Remi Wg

• Open SaaS by wasp-lang

How will my SaaS stand out in the noise?

Here are a few strategies that could help you differentiate and achieve product market fit (based on the pivot principles from The Lean Startup by Eric Ries):

1. Personalize UX for a niche audience: Design for professions which need Scribes such as Vets (Scribenote’s focus), Therapists, Dentists, Teachers, Lawyers, Recruiters & Researchers (for interviews) etc. Alternatively, target specific regions or industries with unique requirements for language, channel, or features.

2. Add unique features to increase switching cost: Exclusive sticky features could mean unique language support, unique meeting channels, industry specific reporting, and integrations with existing tools used by your audience.

3. Offer platform level advantages: You could ship native mobile/desktop apps for a more integrated, channel independent, UX. Additionally, if this is executed solely using a local, non api-driven, deployment (eg. combine llama+whisper+pyannote), then privacy could become a big selling factor and attract higher licensing fees.

TMI? I’m an ex-AI engineer and product lead, so don’t hesitate to reach out with any questions!

P.S. I've started a free weekly newsletter to share open-source/turnkey resources behind popular products (like this one). If you’re a founder looking to launch your next product without reinventing the wheel, please subscribe :)

Currently using Fireflies for meetings and am considering Teams Premium. Do you have experience with ai note takers and TP and if so, how do you compare them? Only using Fireflies for meeting recap and notes/audio review as needed.

For the past two years, I've been using Fireflies.ai to transcribe my MS Team's, Google Meet and Zoom calls. I have hundreds of transcripts BUT Fireflies has no bulk download capability. I often run these transcripts through ChatGPT to summarise project discussions or mine them for workshop improvements that I can make. My solution was to ask my VA to download the files manually and work from there. I’m working on a project that requires 40 to 50 files, so I needed an alternative to my VA.

Here are the complete step-by-step instructions to download your Fireflies.ai transcripts:

https://lesliebarry.substack.com/p/solved-firefliesai-bulk-transcript

Try it out and let me know if you discover any bugs or potential improvements.

Enter Claude.AI

To solve this problem, I asked Claude to suggest options. Claude suggested a Python script 👀 (despite having zero Python experience). Working on my Mac, Claude guided me through multiple iterations over about 45 minutes until we had a working solution for automatic bulk downloads. While this automation has made my virtual assistant's transcription management role redundant, it's solved my problem, saved me money and paid for my Claude, ChatGPT and Fireflies subscription!

The script has been performing excellently, and I wanted to share it with you.

Here are the complete step-by-step instructions to download your Fireflies.ai transcripts:

https://lesliebarry.substack.com/p/solved-firefliesai-bulk-transcript

Try it out and let me know if you discover any bugs or potential improvements.

Hey everyone, been getting reports from Faculty on Fireflies.ai and some are not happy about. Any of you have experience with this? What did you institution say about this? Is it acceptable? Worries or concerns?

I have been telling faculty to reach out to our general counsel, but just would like to see who else is dealing with this.

Thanks

EDIT: I am not with them, I'm in Fac Dev at a university.
EDIT2: Sorry for the broken link. Its a bot that records and transcribes meetings. When signing up it connects to your outlook or google calendar. We use MS Teams and some have reported that it comes in as a "user".

I am doing research on the various AI Assistants right now in hopes to integrate something into our Teams meetings for my work. My boss has been interested in integrating an AI Assistant for Teams meetings, so I'm doing some research.

Looking at those three, it seems like they offer basically the same thing across the board. I can't really seem to see if one has an "edge" over the others.

I basically want it to be able to transcribe meetings, summarize, outline, and provide a list of action items - which all of these tend to do. Are there any that are "better" than the others?

We're also looking at utilizing Copilot 365, but it seems like it may be more than we need at the moment.

Hey everyone,

I'm curious about how AI-powered meeting assistants like Read.ai and Fireflies.ai actually work under the hood. When they join a Zoom, Google Meet, or Teams call, are they operating as bots, or are they added as virtual user accounts?

Also, if anyone has insights into the basic architecture or system design behind such tools, I’d love to learn more. For example:

• How do they get access to meetings (calendar integration, invites, etc.)?

• How are they capturing audio or video in real time?

• Are they transcribing on-device or using third-party APIs?

• What’s their backend setup like (streaming, transcription, summarization, storage)?

I’m not looking for any proprietary secrets—just a general overview of how such applications typically function.

Thanks in advance!