Fireflies helps companies get more out of meetings
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.
“There’s a tremendous amount of data generated in meetings that can help your team stay on the same page,” says Sam Udotong ’16, who founded the company with Krish Ramineni in 2016. “We let people capture that data, search through it, and then share it to the places that matter most.”
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.
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.
“[Fred] is giving you perfect memory,” says Udotong, who serves as Firelies’ chief technology officer. “The dream is for everyone to have perfect recall and make all their decisions based on the right information. So being able to search back to exact points in conversation and remember that is powerful. People have told us it makes them look smarter in front of clients.”
Taking the leap
Udotong was introduced to the power of machine learning in his first year at MIT while working on a project in which students built a drone that could lead people on campus tours. Later, during his first MIT hackathon, he sought to use machine learning in a cryptography solution. That’s when he met Ramineni, who was a student at the University of Pennsylvania. That's also when Fireflies was born — although the founders would go on to change everything about the company besides its name as they sought to use artificial intelligence to improve efficiency in a range of fields.
“We ended up building six iterations of Fireflies before this current meeting assistant,” Udotong remembers. “And every time we would build a different iteration, we would tell our friends, ‘Download it, use it, and get back to us next week, we’ll grab coffee.’ We were...
