Lean In on Leap Day - Automate Your Meeting Notes with Fireflies.AI, a Digital Notetaking Assistant

It’s February 29 – a leap day and the one time when the shortest month of the year gets an extra day. How will you spend your time on this day?

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As a business person, you’ll likely take advantage of today by catching up on open action items or maybe even squeezing in more meetings.

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If you plan to spend a good bit of leap day in meetings, then you may find this article of particular interest since it offers a way to leverage a digital assistant in capturing notes from your meetings.

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In my last article, I shared a template for capturing notes from your meetings using a digital tablet. Now, I’ll share a way that you can automate your notetaking using AI.

Introducing Fireflies.AI

There are several AI-powered notetaking assistants including Otter, Fellow, ClickUp, and Fireflies. Many of them became particularly popular during the pandemic with the rise of virtual meetings. During that time, I’d been in several virtual meetings where Otter was used, but I dismissed it as yet another transcription tool.

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However, it wasn’t until I recently interviewed Edie Woefle, founder of Keiboarder, on the Business Infrastructure podcast that I became aware of the true capabilities of these tools. Edie happened to talk about Fireflies.AI and so, I decided to learn more about it and test its true capabilities.

Not only does Fireflies transcribe your virtual meeting with timestamps, but it also provides a summary of your meeting along with a detailed listing of action items. It also can record the video of your meeting. What I love most about this digital notetaking assistant is that it can work across multiple virtual meeting platforms including Microsoft Teams, Zoom, and Google Meet.

How it Works

First, I recommend signing up for a free trial at Fireflies.AI. When you sign up, you'll be asked to provide an email address that you want to associate with your account. When my team signed up, we chose to use a generic Gmail address we have for maintaining all our company meetings. Be careful about the email address you select for your Fireflies account because, once it is paired with your calendar, Fireflies will automatically show up to listen and record your meeting anytime that selected email address is part of the list invited.

For example, my assistant and I have a weekly call via Zoom. As one of the meeting hosts, whenever I start the meeting I can see a list of people waiting to enter the virtual room including "Fred." Fred is the personification of Fireflies.AI although oftentimes the name "Fireflies" is what will appear as a meeting participant as shown in the screenshot below.

Once the meeting ends, Fireflies will send a detailed summary of the meeting directly to a page we've created in Notion. This is another cool feature of this AI tool - it integrates with other platforms you may be using. In our case, we use Notion as our document repository.

Tips for Using Fireflies.AI

After you sign up for a free trial of Fireflies.AI, you may find the following tips helpful for quickly ramping up your use of the tool:

1. Integrate Fireflies with a document repository tool your team may already be using (i.e., Dropbox, Google Drive, ClickUp, Notion).
2. Schedule a virtual meeting. Be sure to include the email address associated with your Fireflies account.
3. Start your virtual meeting at least five minutes early. Fireflies will show up. If the meeting starts too late, Fireflies will not arrive and you'll lose the benefit of having your meeting recorded.
4. Once your meeting ends, wait for Fireflies to send the notes to your designated area. Note: if you did not integrate another cloud-based document repository with Fireflies, you can find your meeting notes directly in your Fireflies account.
5. Open the meeting notes and verify that the information is correct. Make adjustments/corrections as necessary.
6. Transfer or copy and paste action items into your project planning tool.

In the image above, note that our team at Equilibria has a designated page where Fireflies automatically sends meeting notes. We then double-check the action items cited and send them to a project tracker that we also have in Notion.

The Notetaking Revolution is Here!

My team and I are so impressed with the accuracy of Fireflies' transcripts, meeting summaries, and lists of action items that we now also use it in some of our in-person meetings. The difference is that we ask that everyone bring their laptops to the meeting so they can also join the virtual meeting and mute their microphones. Everyone is then instructed to simply unmute themselves whenever they want to speak, similar to the old-school days of conference calls where everyone would huddle around a device in the center of a table and take turns talking. This gives Fireflies the ability to still record the audio with a transcript showing everyone's name.

Remember those notes you took on your digital tablet? Well, you can also export them to your document repository and add them to the notes from Fireflies. This way, you have a comprehensive record of your meetings, and because it's all digital, you can easily access your notes from any mobile device.

We've figured out how to make this technology and others seamlessly work into our processes and can do the same for you. If you're interested in learning more, then schedule a free discovery call with me so we can get you started!

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About the Author

Alicia Butler Pierre is the Founder & CEO of Equilibria, Inc. – an operations management firm specializing in increasing enterprise value for fast-growing small businesses. She’s a software inventor, a two-time Amazon bestselling author, and producer of a top 2% podcast.

Alicia is also an adjunct instructor of Lean Principles at Purdue University and serves as the USA Chair of the G100’s Micro, Small, and Medium Enterprises. The Process Excellence Network recognized her as a Top 50 Thought Leader in Operational Excellence. A chemical engineer turned entrepreneur, she’s designed and optimized processes for small businesses, large enterprises, non-profits, and government organizations alike.