How To Make The Most Out Of Fireflies.ai
Every team deserves maximum output from meetings.
You’re in a meeting. Decisions are being taken, new ideas are being discussed, and valuable details are being shared. You need to take notes.
But you also need to pay complete attention to what’s being discussed. And you also need to chime in from time to time.
However, if we’re being honest, no matter how hard you try, remembering all the information, noting everything down, and also staying 100% present in the meeting is impossible.
This is where Fireflies.ai comes to the rescue. You don’t have to worry anymore about critical information falling through the cracks and getting lost after a meeting.
What is Fireflies.ai?
Fireflies is an AI application that records and automatically transcribes your voice conversations, allowing you to seamlessly search for information later on.
You can skim the transcripts while listening to the audio. You can also add comments at specific points in the recording, to quickly collaborate with teammates. Some particular parts of your calls or important moments from your conversations can also be marked for ready-reference. You can easily review an hour-long call in less than 5 minutes.
In the past month, we’ve been using Fireflies at Skynox and it has been an absolute boon for our team. It is an amazing tool for amplifying productivity in your team. But it’s not worth the money if you’re not using it right!
Here are some ways you can make the most of Fireflies.ai.
Optimize The Way You Invite
Fireflies makes use of ‘Fred’, a virtual meeting assistant. Fred joins your meetings and silently transcribes the audio. A few minutes later, you get an email of the recording and its transcript. It also becomes visible in your dashboard.
There are two ways you can invite Fred to your meetings. You can either send an invitation to fred@fireflies.ai or you can ask Fred to auto-join all calls by default.
If you don’t want Fred to join all your meetings, quite obviously you’ll send an invitation to the email id each time you want Fred to join. But when you’re having multiple meetings in a day, there’s always a chance that you may forget to manually invite Fred.
The smart thing to do here would be to add the Fireflies Chrome extension to your browser. It adds a “Transcribe with Fireflies.ai” button to your Google Calendar event.
You don’t have to worry about forgetting to add Fred to your meetings anymore — that pink button will be your reminder each time.
In case you don’t use Google Meet, but use Zoom or any other web-conferencing app, you just have to add the meeting link in the description of the Google event, and Fred will be there!
But you can go one step further and automate the entire process.
Navigate to ‘Settings’ on your Fireflies dashboard and scroll down to ‘Meeting Rules’. In this section (as shown below), you can pre-define a list of meetings you always want Fred to join. You can also make another list of meetings you never want Fred to join.
Not only will this save your time, but also prevent you or your team members from forgetting to add Fred to meetings. At the same time, you can save your Fireflies storage space by making sure Fred doesn’t unnecessarily join and record meetings such as employee training or daily update meetings.
Personalize Fireflies To Meet Your Business Needs
If yours is an HR firm, a lot of your meetings may be candidate interviews. If you sell a product, a lot of your meetings may be about sales or customer feedback.
The kinds of conversations happening in meetings for different businesses will be different. It’s important that Fred knows this information and optimizes the speech model accordingly. It needs to learn more to function better.
Here’s how you can have Fireflies make use of pre-fed knowledge depending on your industry: navigate to ‘Settings’, scroll down to ‘Industry Settings’, and choose the most common type of meeting you have.
For the app to perform better voice recognition, you can also create a custom vocabulary. This section can be found just under the ‘Industry Settings’ option.
Because Fireflies uses AI to figure out the words people speak, adding words such as product names or company names to this list can be a good idea. This will help ensure that your transcripts are accurate, further making it easier to find terms as you search for them.
Learn How To Skim Better
Being able to browse through a meeting and find the point you’re looking for is one of the main features of Fireflies. Not doing this the right way renders the tool useless for your business. So, let’s take a look at two ways to help you skim better.
1. Create Soundbites
Let’s say you were in a meeting with someone who’s selling a product to your company. You had a discussion about the pricing of the product and the available payment plans, and you want to save that information for easy retrieval or sharing.
This is where Soundbites come in. Soundbites are shorter audio clips that you can make from the main audio clip.
Fireflies lets you add a suitable title and relevant tags to the audio clip. Creating Soundbites is an effective way to organize key points from any topic, sorted topic-wise. It makes skimming so much easier.
You can find the tab to create Soundbites when you open any recorded meeting from your dashboard.
2. Use AI Filters
The ‘AI Filters’ can be accessed under the ‘Smart Search’ tab, located right next to Soundbites. It’s an easy-to-use but extremely powerful tool. It can save time and reduce the efforts you put in searching for specific topics.
All you need to do is select the topics you’re interested in, and Fireflies will automatically show you the top matches.
Broaden The Use Cases For Maximum Efficiency
Fireflies has a very wide range of applications. Chances are, you might not be using it in every possible area. Here are some work-related areas where you should begin using Fireflies if you aren’t already.
Use Fireflies for Integrations
If you have meetings over Google Meet and Zoom, but you’re using Slack or Trello for interaction, Fireflies is that middle router which can bring synchronicity to your work life.
You can also use Fireflies to auto-populate your CRM with meeting logs, recordings, notes, and other important information. You can also integrate it with other apps like Salesforce, HubSpot, Slack, Zoho, and Zapier. Although you’ll need to upgrade to a paid plan to use most of these integrations, it’s well worth it if this fits your team’s workflow.
Let Fred Handle Your Meetings
Fred has a human name, understands human voice, and has intelligence too. He’s almost like a human, why not treat him like one? Especially since he can be of immense use to you.
If you haven’t already, start sending Fred to meetings that you can’t attend. Fred can’t talk back, but can surely listen and note down every word being discussed.
Let’s say that your team’s quarterly budget is being announced but you’re stuck with some high-priority work. What do you do? Ask Fred to fill in for you, and simply review the notes later on. Smart move, isn’t it?
Having a perfect memory is the dream because nothing is better than basing your decisions on the right information discussed in meetings. Using this information the right way can help your team stay on the same page.
In fact, companies and professionals are quickly realizing that being able to efficiently search, sort, and collaborate across audio data unlocks new possibilities.
Fireflies not only lets you capture this data, but also share it to places that matter the most. And now that you’re armed with the knowledge of squeezing the most out of this application, go ahead and gift your team the productivity they deserve.
If you liked this blog and want to read more about productivity, check out our publication The Skynox Blog. We write about productivity, health & fitness, entrepreneurship, and the tech & startup world.
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