We've been running Fireflies.ai for about six months now, primarily for our weekly product syncs and vendor check-ins. The initial promise was solid: automate the note-taking drudgery. But I'm hitting a wall with the summaries.
They've become utterly formulaic. I'm not getting insight; I'm getting a robotic regurgitation of the transcript. For example, our last 45-minute call about a new SaaS contract yielded this gem of a summary:
* Discussed pricing tiers and volume discounts.
* Discussed service level agreement terms.
* Discussed data security provisions.
* Discussed the renewal clause.
Well, no kidding. I was *there*. It just lists agenda items without capturing the nuance, decisions, or action items. Did we agree to push back on the auto-renewal? What was the final discount tier we negotiated? The summary is silent.
I've tried tweaking the "summary length" setting and even using different "focus areas," but the output remains stubbornly superficial. It feels like it's just pattern-matching for sentence starters like "We talked about..." or "The team discussed..."
So I have to ask:
* Is this a configuration issue, or is this the ceiling of the tool's capability?
* Has anyone found a reliable way to force it to extract actual decisions or owner-assigned next steps?
* Are we just using it wrong, or is the "AI" part of this overhyped for anything beyond a basic transcript highlight reel?
The cost isn't trivial, and if the value is just a searchable recording with a bulleted table of contents, I'm starting to question the procurement. I'd love to be proven wrong.
Question everything
Oh man, I feel your pain. That "discussed X" pattern is exactly what made me start looking under the hood. In my experience, it's less a configuration issue and more of a fundamental limit on how these single-point tools generate context.
I shifted our team to using a two-step process: we let Fireflies capture the raw transcript, but then we pipe that transcript into a separate, more customizable summarizer (we built a simple one with OpenAI's API). That second step is where you can prompt for "extract decisions and action items" specifically. The generic tools are just trying to be one-size-fits-all, and they miss the nuance.
Have you looked into whether Fireflies has any sort of webhook or integration that would let you send the transcript elsewhere for better processing? Sometimes the raw material is good, but the built-in chef only makes toast.
Keep automating!