What is Fireflies.ai? A clear explanation of its main features, pricing, and benefits

Are you struggling with the time it takes to create meeting minutes, and dealing with missing content or delays in sharing?

In recent years, AI notetakers that can create transcriptions and summaries from meeting recordings in real-time have been gaining attention.

Among these, "Fireflies.ai" is one of the popular tools that features high-precision transcription and versatile integration capabilities.

This article provides an easy-to-understand explanation of Fireflies.ai's features, pricing plans, main functions, and advantages and disadvantages. Please use this as a reference if you want to reduce the effort of creating meeting minutes and improve your team's operational efficiency.

What is Fireflies.ai?

Fireflies.ai: https://fireflies.ai/

Fireflies.ai is an AI notetaker that can automate everything from real-time transcription to meeting minutes creation.

It can integrate with major online meeting tools such as Zoom, Google Meet, and Microsoft Teams, allowing you to manage meeting recording, summarization, and sharing all in one place.

It also features a variety of functions that support business operations, including integration with external tools and extraction of action items. It particularly excels in English-language environments and is well-suited for use by global teams.

For more detailed information about AI notetaker tool comparisons, please refer to the following article:

Reference article: What is an AI notetaker? Explaining reasons for adoption and key points for tool selection

Fireflies.ai Pricing Plans

Fireflies.ai offers the following four pricing plans:

• Free

• Pro

• Business

• Enterprise

This chapter introduces the features, pricing, and main available functions of each plan. If you are considering Fireflies.ai, please find the plan that suits you best.

Free

Fireflies.ai's Free plan is a complimentary plan designed for those who want to try out AI notetaker functionality. It features no charges whatsoever and can be used without any time restrictions.

It integrates with meeting tools like Zoom, Google Meet, and Teams, offering real-time transcription, AI summaries, and recording storage for up to 800 minutes.

It also includes comprehensive basic features such as the AskFred AI chat function, meeting search capabilities, and Chrome extension functionality.

Pro

The Pro plan is a paid plan ideal for individual professionals and small teams, available from $10 per person per month when paid annually.

Compared to the Free plan, it offers significantly expanded functionality, including unlimited transcription and AI summaries, plus the ability to store up to 8,000 minutes of recordings.

Additionally, it includes features for more advanced workflow efficiency, such as downloading recordings and transcripts, extracting action items, and unlimited integration with external tools.

This plan is recommended for those who want to fully incorporate AI notetaker into their daily work operations.

Business

The Business plan is designed for full-scale operation at the team level. With annual payment, it is available for $19 per person per month.

In addition to all Pro plan features, advanced functions such as video recording, team analytics, API integration, and user group management become available.

Beyond recording, summarization, and task management, it enables centralized management of multiple users' information, allowing efficient management and sharing of meeting data within teams.

It is characterized by its ability to easily accommodate team-level implementation and operations that comply with internal company rules.

Enterprise

The Enterprise plan is the top-tier plan designed for large teams and companies that require advanced security requirements. It is available at $39 per person per month with annual payment.

In addition to all Business plan features, it includes enhanced enterprise-level management and protection features such as SSO, HIPAA compliance, custom data retention, and private storage.

A dedicated account manager support system is also in place to address concerns regarding implementation and operation.

This plan is ideal for companies that require compliance or large enterprises that need centralized management across multiple departments.

Main Features of Fireflies.ai

The main features of Fireflies.ai that are actually being utilized are as follows:

• Meeting recording and real-time transcription

• Automatic summary generation

• Search meeting content by keywords and speakers

• Integration with external tools such as CRM and Slack

• Issue identification through sentiment analysis

• Chrome extension

Please use this as a reference before implementation to understand what specifically can be accomplished.

Meeting Recording and Real-time Transcription

Fireflies.ai integrates with major online meeting tools to automatically record and document meetings.

Real-time transcription occurs simultaneously with recording, allowing conversation content to be visualized on the spot and eliminating the need to take notes.

A key feature is the ability to automatically identify and record each speaker's voice, making it clear who said what.

After the meeting ends, the text data is saved as a transcript, making it easy to review and search. This is a feature that can significantly reduce the effort required to manually create meeting minutes.

Automatic Summary Generation

Based on recorded meeting content, AI automatically extracts key points and generates easy-to-understand summaries.

Since central topics of discussion, decisions made, and action items are organized, the time needed to review the entire meeting can be significantly reduced.

Particularly in long meetings or meetings with many participants, it tends to be difficult to grasp the overall flow and important remarks, but this feature makes it possible to immediately check necessary information.

The summaries are easy to use for information sharing within teams and as meeting minutes, and are also helpful for follow-ups. The major appeal is that you can efficiently grasp the essence of meetings without needing to read the full text of remarks.

Search Meeting Content by Keywords and Speakers

Fireflies.ai is equipped with a feature that allows you to easily search past meeting content by keywords or individual speakers.

Since all content discussed during meetings is transcribed and saved, it's possible to pinpoint exactly "who" said "what" after the fact.

For example, when you want to extract only comments related to a specific project or remarks from a particular person, you can reach the relevant sections within seconds. There's no need to read through meeting minutes from the beginning, which significantly improves the efficiency of review work and enables smooth progress in all post-meeting practical tasks such as internal information sharing and decision-making.

Integration with External Tools such as CRM and Slack

A major feature is the ability to integrate with various external services such as Salesforce and Slack.

When a meeting ends, AI-generated summaries can be automatically sent to specified tools, enabling applications such as sharing to Slack or registering as business negotiation information in CRM systems.

Tasks such as meeting recording, reporting, and handovers are automated, dramatically improving work efficiency.

Additionally, there is no longer a need to manage information across multiple tools, leading to information centralization. This is effective not only for reducing manual work but also for expanding the scope of data utilization, thereby enhancing the overall team's ability to drive business forward.

Issue Discovery Through Sentiment Analysis

Fireflies.ai is equipped with a feature that analyzes emotional trends based on statements made during meetings.

The AI analyzes the tone and word choice of statements, visualizing the flow of emotions such as negative and positive sentiments, making it easier to understand the atmosphere of dialogue and changes in reactions.

The advantage is that you can objectively confirm real reactions including interest, anxiety, and discomfort from the other party during sales meetings, interviews, and internal meetings. For example, you can identify moments when a client's reaction turns negative and use this information to improve responses in future interactions.

Since issues can be extracted based on speech data rather than relying on subjectivity, this is an effective support function for workplaces that want to improve the quality of conversations.

Chrome Extension

Fireflies.ai provides a dedicated Chrome extension that, once installed, allows you to perform recording and transcription operations with just one click directly from your browser.

Since it can directly integrate with Google Meet's web conferencing tool, it offers intuitive features such as automatically starting recordings when meetings begin and displaying real-time notes.

The ability to complete all operations within the browser without opening separate applications provides significant time-saving benefits for busy business professionals.

Additionally, the initial setup is simple - you can start using it immediately after enabling the extension, making it easy to adopt with a low barrier to entry and user-friendly for first-time users.

Benefits of Fireflies.ai

The following three benefits can be obtained by actually implementing Fireflies.ai:

• Important statements can be recorded with timestamps

• Information sharing between teams becomes more efficient

• Security and access rights management is flexible

Let's look at each of these in order.

Record Important Statements with Timestamps

With Fireflies.ai, you can easily leave timestamped comments and bookmarks the moment important statements or action items come up during a meeting.

By utilizing this feature, you can quickly access important sections when reviewing meeting minutes after the meeting ends, making information organization and confirmation work extremely efficient.

In long meetings covering diverse topics or situations where multiple people are speaking, the major benefit is being able to record important points without missing them.

Additionally, since bookmarks can be shared with team members, this prevents misunderstandings and allows everyone to proceed to the next action based on the same information.

Information sharing between teams becomes more efficient

The reason Fireflies.ai excels at streamlining information sharing is that "audio recording, transcription, and summarization" are centralized and automatically organized.

Unlike tools that only record audio or simple transcription services, Fireflies.ai can record and summarize in real-time while identifying content by each speaker, making it possible to grasp the overall picture of meeting content in a short time.

Additionally, the generated meeting minutes are easy to share on the web, and the content can be distributed to the entire team with just one URL.

While other tools require manual work for information organization, Fireflies.ai automatically structures the information and formats it in an easily shareable form.

Flexible Security and Access Rights Management

Access permissions for recorded data, transcriptions, AI summaries, and other content can be configured in detail for each user, making it possible to share necessary information only with those who need it.

For example, you can implement flexible operations according to the importance and confidentiality of information, such as meetings that only executive management can view, or records that only specific project members can access.

This type of access control reduces the risk of accidental transmission and information leaks while also contributing to internal information governance and compliance management.

Since appropriate information management can be conducted according to the organization's scale and industry type, it can be confidently implemented even for highly confidential operations.

Disadvantages of Fireflies.ai

While Fireflies.ai is multifunctional and highly convenient, there are some points to consider when contemplating its implementation. The following three disadvantages of Fireflies.ai can be identified:

• Japanese recognition accuracy is somewhat inferior compared to English

• The free plan has limitations on storage capacity and features

• Uploading takes time

We will introduce the disadvantages that have become apparent from actual user experience, so please use this as a reference.

Japanese recognition accuracy is somewhat inferior compared to English

Since Fireflies.ai was originally developed primarily targeting users in English-speaking regions, its speech recognition accuracy in Japanese tends to be somewhat inferior compared to English.

Particularly in conversations involving rapid speech or technical terminology, misrecognition in transcription and contextual misunderstandings are likely to occur, requiring subsequent corrections.

When I actually tested it, the overall summary of the recorded content was generally accurate, but several Japanese recognition errors were observed in the transcript.

When using it for work that requires accuracy, it's important to understand this limitation beforehand and devise appropriate usage methods.

Let's also look forward to future updates that improve accuracy.

Free plans have limitations on storage capacity and features

While free plans allow you to try the service casually, they come with several restrictions.

For example, the storage limit for recorded data is capped at 800 minutes per user, and the number of times you can use transcription and AI summary features is also limited.

Therefore, if you want to regularly record and share meetings, or if you're planning to use it with a multi-person team, you'll likely reach the limits quickly.

When considering full-scale business use, choosing a paid plan of Pro or higher will allow you to operate smoothly without feature restrictions.

Upload Takes Time

Fireflies.ai has a feature that allows you to upload pre-recorded audio data for transcription, but processing requires a certain amount of time.

When I actually uploaded one hour of audio data, it took approximately 7-8 minutes for the transcription to complete.

For long meeting recordings with large file sizes, it may take even longer, so caution is needed in business situations that require speedy sharing and decision-making.

Getting Started wih Fireflies.ai

For those who want to easily try Fireflies.ai, we'll introduce how to get started with the Free plan. While the process may seem somewhat complex, you can smoothly complete the registration by following along with the images, so please use this as a reference.

First, access Fireflies.ai and click "Start for Free."

Select either Google or Microsoft. When you click on the account you normally use, it will automatically integrate with your calendar and reflect your meeting schedule.

This time we selected Google. You'll be asked to enter your email address and confirm access permissions, so follow the instructions to proceed.

Next, questions about meeting settings and your role/position will be displayed, so answer them.

After answering all the questions, a notice saying "Start 7-day free trial" will appear. This is a guidance screen leading to the paid plan trial version.

If you want to continue using the Free plan, click the "×" (close) button in the upper right corner of the screen to skip it. By skipping, you can immediately use the Free plan.

If you want to start the free trial of the Business plan, don't skip and click the "Start Free Trial" button. Follow the instructions to enter your credit card number, and the 7-day free trial will begin.

Streamline Meeting Information Organization with 'Rimo Voice'

If you want to organize meeting information more efficiently, we recommend implementing 'Rimo Voice', which starts from 4,500 yen per month.

'Rimo Voice' can complete transcription and summarization of even a 1-hour meeting in about 5 minutes just by uploading audio or video files.

When integrated with your calendar, the Bot automatically joins meetings and performs recording, real-time transcription, speaker separation, and summarization all automatically.

With natural language processing technology specialized for Japanese, it excels at contextual understanding and handling specialized terminology, making it easy to use in various industry settings including medical, legal, and IT fields.

Additionally, using AI chat allows for real-time review of important statements and content even during meetings. The Japanese-specialized functionality and operational simplicity that Fireflies.ai lacks has gained support in many business scenarios.

'Rimo Voice' offers a one-week free trial, so please experience it for yourself.

Streamline Your Work with Meeting Minutes Tools That Fit Your Purpose!

If you want to organize meeting information, implementing Fireflies.ai is effective.

In addition to real-time recording, transcription, and summarization features, it comes equipped with diverse functions such as speaker identification, timestamp recording, and sentiment analysis, dramatically improving the efficiency of organizing and sharing information after meetings.

Moreover, the ability to integrate with external tools like Slack and CRM systems is a major advantage for team utilization.

However, it's important to note that Japanese recognition accuracy is inferior to English, and there are functional limitations in the free plan. First, try the Free plan to check the usability and accuracy, and consider whether it meets your company's needs.