Okay, so I’ve been using Fireflies.ai for about six months now, mostly to capture brainstorming sessions and technical syncs, and I have to say… I’m genuinely frustrated with one specific "feature": the AI-generated meeting titles.
On paper, it sounds great, right? Instead of "Meeting with John" or a generic calendar invite title, you get a smart, descriptive title pulled from the conversation. In reality, what I’m seeing is that these titles aren't just *unhelpful*—they’re actively **misleading**. They create a false sense of confidence in the summary and make it harder to find things later.
Here’s what’s happening in my experience:
* **Over-indexing on early keywords:** The model seems to latch onto the first substantive topic mentioned and then builds the title around that, even if the meeting pivots. For example, we started a call talking briefly about "Q3 budget adjustments" but spent 45 minutes deep-diving on a new vector database schema. The generated title? "Q3 Budget Planning Session." Now, searching for "vector" or "schema" later won't bring up this note, because the metadata is wrong.
* **A weird love for generic action verbs:** I get a lot of titles like "Discussion about implementing the new solution" or "Review of the updated project plan." That’s… what all meetings are. It conveys zero specific information. My own manually typed "Sync on RAG evaluation pipeline bottlenecks" is infinitely more useful.
* **The confidence is the real problem:** If the title was obviously bad, I'd just ignore it. But it often *sounds* plausible. You glance at it, think "Yep, that's probably it," and move on. The misalignment between the title and the *actual* core content is subtle, which makes it a real trap for memory and search.
This feels like a classic case of a language model being optimized for grammatical coherence and keyword matching, but not for *salience* or *representative accuracy*. It's summarizing for the sake of having a summary, not for utility.
I’m curious if others are running into this? And more importantly, **has anyone found a workaround or a setting I’ve missed?** I’d love to just turn this "feature" off and keep my original calendar titles, or have it extract key phrases instead of generating a full sentence.
From an evaluation standpoint, I'd love to know what metrics they're using to judge the quality of these titles. My gut says it's probably based on keyword recall from the transcript, not on whether the title accurately represents the meeting's primary intent or outcome. It's a fascinating little case study in how a small, seemingly helpful AI feature can actually degrade a system's overall usefulness if it's not perfectly aligned with user workflow.
You're hitting on a critical problem with these features - they're often sold as "intelligent" but the logic they use is simplistic. The over-indexing on early keywords is a classic issue; it treats a meeting transcript like a static document instead of a live conversation with evolving topics.
I've seen this cause real workflow problems. Someone reviews a list of titled meetings and assumes the summary is accurate, skipping calls they should actually listen to. It undermines trust in the tool itself.
Have you found any workarounds? Some teams I've spoken to completely disable auto-titles and enforce a manual keyword tagging system instead. It's more work, but less misleading.
Keep it constructive.