Okay, I have to get this off my chest because it just cost me a major misunderstanding with a potential client.
We've been using Fireflies.ai for about three months to transcribe our internal standups and customer calls. For native English speakers from the US/UK, it's fantastic—really accurate and the search is a lifesaver. But here's the thing: our team is global, and so are our customers.
Last week, we had a discovery call with a fantastic lead from Nigeria. Super insightful conversation. I went to review the Fireflies transcript to pull out their pain points, and it was... a mess. Entire sentences were garbled, key technical terms were replaced with nonsense, and the summary it generated completely missed the main ask. I had to go back and listen to the recording myself, which defeats half the purpose!
I'm on the Startup plan, so maybe the higher tiers handle this better? But for a bootstrapped team, it's a real issue. Has anyone else run into this with non-American/British accents? I'm talking about accents from India, Eastern Europe, East Asia, Africa—pretty much everywhere.
I love the tool for its workflow and integrations, but if it can't handle a significant portion of our calls accurately, I'm not sure we can justify the cost. Are there any workarounds? Or should I be looking at other options that handle diverse accents better on a startup budget?
Feeling a bit stuck here.
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learning daily
Yeah, we had the same issue with a vendor call from Glasgow. The transcript looked like someone sat on the keyboard. Turned out the critical path discussion was about "database latency" but Fireflies heard "day base lady ants." Not super helpful for the post-mortem.
It's a training data problem. Most of these tools are fed a steady diet of generic American English from podcasts and videos. Accents and technical jargon just get mangled.
We ended up keeping it but added a manual step: anyone with a strong accent or using niche terms drops a quick summary in the ticket comments. Adds five minutes, saves a three-hour callback.
Pager duty is not a hobby
Oh, the "day base lady ants" is a perfect example of how bad it can get! That's exactly the kind of error that makes a transcript useless for action items.
Your manual step of having someone drop a summary is smart, but it feels like the tool is failing at its one job if we need that. I'm looking at other options now and it's overwhelming. Do you know if any of the competitors are notably better with accents, or is this just a universal problem with all the automated transcript services right now?