Many decisions are made and details sorted out in a productive business meeting. But in order for that meeting to translate into results, participants have to remember all those details, understand their assignments, and follow through on commitments.
The startup Fireflies.ai is helping people get the most out of their meetings with a note-taking, information-organizing virtual assistant named Fred. Fred transcribes every word of meetings and then uses artificial intelligence to help people sort and share that information later on.
The tool integrates with popular meeting and scheduling software like Zoom and Google Calendar so users can quickly add Fred to calls. It also works with collaboration platforms like Slack and customer management software like Salesforce to help ensure plans turn into coordinated action.
After the meeting, the AI assistant sends a full transcript to whomever the organizer chooses, allowing users to click on sections of the transcript to hear that part of the meeting audio. Users can also search the transcript and go through an hourlong meeting in five minutes.
Fireflies is used by people working in roles including sales, recruiting, and product management. They can use the service to automate project management tasks, screen candidates, and manage internal team communications.
In the last few months, driven in part by the Covid-19 pandemic, Fred has sat through millions of minutes of meetings involving more than half a million people. And the founders believe Fred can do more than simply help people adjust to remote work; it can also help them collaborate more effectively than ever before.
As the company has grown, customers have begun using Fred for use cases the founders hadn’t even considered, like sending Fred to meetings that they can’t attend and reviewing the notes later on.
It’s kind of like what Google did with search. There was five to 10 years of web data building up, and there was no way for people to find what they were looking for. The same thing is true today of audio and meeting data. It’s out there, but there’s no way to actually find what you’re looking for because it’s never even stored in the first place.
News source: MIT
