The Best AI Notetaker for Meetings?

Looking for a Fireflies AI review? You’re in the right place! This automated notetaker can help you with a bunch of different notetaking functions, and we’re covering how it works in this article!

Notetaking is tedious, time-consuming, and one of those monotonous tasks that people just don’t like doing. But, it’s a necessary task to record meeting minutes, take meeting notes, record action items, and other important information.

What if you could use an AI tool to take your notes for you?

That’s the promise behind Fireflies AI.

It’s a transcription tool, voice conversation recorder, and AI notetaker all in one!

Curious to learn how it works and see if it’s truly worth it?

In this Fireflies AI review, we’re going to cover:

• What Fireflies AI is and how it works
• Features
• Support
• Pricing, and
• Alternatives.

Short on time?

Fireflies AI Review: Overview

Fireflies AI will record and transcribe your meetings.

Run the AI tool and let it work for you to:

• Capture video and audio
• Transcribe meetings into notes
• Summarize and review meetings
• Create soundbites
• Integrate with the apps and tools you’re using, like Asana, Slack, and Notion, among others.

Outsource your meeting notetaking to this tool so you can focus on the important topics being discussed in your meetings.

Why Free Voice Typing Apps Don’t Always Work

I recently sat in on an important hour-long meeting. 

I knew notetaking was going to be needed, and while I tirelessly typed away during the first quarter of the meeting, a lightbulb moment happened.

And so, I did!

I thought it was a genius idea, and while the idea of enabling voice typing so transcriptions of the live phone call can happen sounded good, it didn’t quite work out that way.

What happened?

First, even with the volume turned all the way up, the phone call wasn’t loud enough for Google to capture every word the speaker was saying, despite putting my laptop next to the phone.

Next, I find that voice typing makes a lot of errors. I usually have to stop every minute or so to make corrections. Doing that during a live phone call is impossible, however hard I tried.

Then, voice typing transcribes into Google Docs in one big, long document, like a never-ending paragraph. It makes it difficult to break apart the text into smaller paragraphs to make it more readable. And there are no summaries.

So, after about 10 minutes or so of trying to make it work, I gave up, and I was back to tirelessly note-taking on my computer, trying to keep up for the remaining half hour of the phone call!

True story.

Fireflies AI Features

The idea of an AI notetaker sounds very appealing. Think about all those meetings you can have your AI notetaking assistant work on for you so you can sit back and relax.

Ditch multitasking during meetings and get a chance to truly listen and participate in the discussion.

Here’s a deeper look into the features offered by Fireflies AI:

• Conversation intelligence
• Fireflies apps
• Google Chrome extension
• API.

Conversation Intelligence

There are many interesting tools built into this conversation intelligence feature:

• Conversation quality
• Performance tracking
• Key topic tracking.

Conversation Quality

You can get important insights from meetings so you understand your meetings better.

We’ve been in those meetings that run an hour long. At the end of the meeting, even with notes being taken and recorded for everyone who attended, there’s valuable information that’s probably not being recorded.

And, it feels impossible to try to recall in your memory every detail that was discussed: who was talking, people who objected or were in favor of the topic, etc.

But Fireflies AI captures it!

• Number of conversations
• Number of monologues
• Longest monologue.

Conversations can be filtered by speaker. Topics discussed in the meeting can be tracked, and it even detects sentiment!

Imagine being in a 2-hour long Google Meet virtual meeting with a room full of people and multiple speakers in offices across the country. You can’t remember if your team members felt positive, negative, or neutral about the new project being launched.

Rather than asking them, it’d be handy to have it recorded within the meeting!

Fireflies AI can do that!

Performance Tracking

Another cool feature of this tool is that management or admins can track the performance of each team member during the meeting.

• Who was engaged?
• What person asked what question?
• How many questions did they ask?
• How long were the conversations, and who had the longest monologue?

You can capture all this within this meeting notes AI tool!

Track Key Topics

Tracking keywords or key topics within meetings can happen too!

For example, if your team is meeting about the launch of a new product, you might assign key topics like:

Fireflies AI can tell you how frequently these key topics came up within the meeting, objections, and other topics that arose during the discussion.

Fireflies Apps

Fireflies AI has an app store filled with Fireflies apps you can use during your meetings.

AskFred

This AI assistant can answer meeting-related questions. You can also automate tasks and generate content with AskFred.

Other apps include:

• Screening interview notes
• Score phone calls
• Create blog posts and content from meeting notes
• Summarize transcript snippets
• Create quotes from the meeting
• Create emails and reports
• Meeting transcription into 69+ different languages.

Google Chrome Extension

Download the Google Chrome Extension so you can start automating meeting notes and recording transcripts via the Chrome extension.

• Google Meet calls can be captured
• Bots are blocked from meetings
• Speaker labels
• Timestamped captions
• Smart search
• Sentiment filters.

How Does The Fireflies AI Google Chrome Extension Work In Meetings?

1. Google Meet call starts (Transcription on Loom, Soapbox, and Bubbles is also available)
2. Fireflies AI will auto-capture and start transcribing the meeting (you can stop the transcription any time during the meeting)
3. Receive an email when the meeting has finished processing.

API

The API can integrate with your dialer or third-party conference software.

• Upload audio: You can upload your meeting audio into Fireflies AI to have it transcribed fast.
• Extract transcripts: Pulling transcripts from past meetings can happen easily. You can also extract keywords, sentences, and entire transcripts.
• Delete transcripts: Remove unwanted meetings from Fireflies AI’s servers.
• Record users and user roles: Get important information about a user, like their role, contact details, number of meeting minutes they consumed, and more. This includes getting team-wide information and assigning roles within a team.

Learn more about how the API works.

Fireflies AI Support

In terms of support, Fireflies AI offers multiple ways to contact them via chat and to report a bug.

Their resources section is filled with tips and tricks from their help center, blog, customer stories, and more.

On G2, they’re ranked 4.7/5 stars from over 300 reviews. Reviewers talked about how customer service handled their issues; they were responsive and committed to solving their problem.

Fireflies AI Pricing

There are 4 pricing plans, including a free forever plan. Monthly and annual billing is offered with a 40% discount for annual billing.

Here’s the breakdown of some of the core features you get in each of the plans:

• Free: You get limited AI summaries and 800 minutes of storage per seat
• Pro ($18/seat per month): Unlimited AI summaries, 8,000 minutes of storage per seat
• Business ($29/seat per month): Unlimited AI summaries and unlimited storage per seat
• Enterprise ($39/seat per month): Unlimited AI summaries and unlimited storage per seat.

All plans include features like:

• Unlimited transcription
• Record Zoom, Google Meet, MSTeams, and others
• Uploads
• Global search
• Search within meetings.

Additional features like AI apps, public channels, integrations, video screen capture, and onboarding are available based on the plan type.

Fireflies AI Alternatives

If you’re still on the fence, here are some alternatives to Fireflies AI you can look into.

Otter AI: Best For All Users

Otter AI is an AI meeting notetaker and transcription tool. They offer real-time transcription, AI chat, and AI channels so you can connect with other team members. What makes this different from other AI notetakers is that it caters to different users, not just business users who need AI notetaking and transcription for work meetings.

Otter AI is for individuals, students, educators, professionals, etc.

You can use it for many purposes, from recording team meetings at work to closing deals and sales with new customers in your business, helping students and teachers in an educational setting, and storytelling in the media.

It integrates with video conferencing software like Zoom, Microsoft Teams, and Google Meet. Plus, collaborations with other apps like Slack, Notion, Google Docs, and others.

Read our Otter AI review to learn more about how Otter AI works.

There’s a free plan, and paid plans start at $16.99/user per month. You get 40% off for annual billing. You also get a 7-day free trial.

Fathom: Best Affordable Option For Individuals

Fathom offers notetaking, transcription, highlights, and summaries, so you can outsource the notetaking during meetings and focus on what’s being discussed.

While all the AI notetaker tools we covered in this roundup have a free option, Fathom is the only one with a primarily free option for individuals. This free version is the main tool, with a new paid Team Edition option recently rolled out.

You get fully transcribed meetings with the ability to highlight key sections. You also get summaries, and Fathom can sync the notes to your CRM. You get all this in the free edition.

Fathom Team Edition lets you store your team’s calls in a single location.

You get insights like:

• Number of recent calls
• Talk time
• Monologues and questions

Plus, keyword alerts are available to tell you when certain words were used during a call.

There’s a 14-day free trial, and paid plans start at $24/user per month.

Notta: The Most Affordable Option For Business and Teams

Notta offers AI audio and video transcription. This tool is for transcribing and summarizing meetings and audio recordings.

• AI templates
• Screen recording
• Collaborative workspace
• Real-time translation
• Bilingual audio file transcription (in 4 languages: English, Chinese, Japanese, and Vietnamese).

Notta is one of the best options for staying organized. They focus on creating a detailed meeting summary and extracting action items so you can recap the meeting afterward to quickly see discussion points, decisions, next steps, etc.

To use Notta, you activate it with one click. Then you can start transcribing your online or face-to-face meetings or audio/video files:

1. Import files to transcribe
2. Live transcription with timestamps.

Notta supports 58 transcription languages. It can also provide summaries and create action items for you.

Outsourcing the entire meeting process is possible with Notta. Google Calendar so Notta can schedule your meetings. Then, you’ll conduct your meeting with real-time transcription, followed by the summary preparation. Lastly, you can export and share transcripts.

Notta offers a free plan that is perfect for individuals who want to try it out. Paid plans start at $13.99/user per month with 40% off for annual billing.

Fireflies AI Review: Bottom Line

Are you sold yet?

With AI tools exploding all over the internet, from AI content tools to AI business productivity tools and more, I’m happy that an AI notetaker exists.

Automated transcription and notetaking is such a smart way to outsource notes in meetings.

You can get a fully fleshed-out meeting recap, pulling out all the important information from the meeting. You’ll get accurate meeting insights to know what key topics were talked about, for how long, and who contributed to the conversation.

Fireflies AI is one of the best transcription tools and AI assistants for companies and businesses to record meeting notes. This is valuable to have if you’re working in a role or company that has meetings regularly.

Fireflies AI is the tool for work meetings! If you have zero or few meetings for work, you could use this tool for personal too. 

The free forever plan would be a solid option to look into for those one-off meetings you may have throughout the year for things like a group chat virtual meeting to discuss the plans of your family reunion, friends group vacation, or even virtual medical appointments that you might want to capture and review the notes later for.

This is an awesome tool to have in your back pocket!