Microsoft recently introduced Copilot in Teams meetings, a feature that summarises key discussion points in real-time. It identifies speakers, notes agreements and disagreements, and suggests action items. Similarly, Zoom launched Zoom AI Companion, allowing users to ask specific questions about meeting content. 

But, in a world of Copilots, how are companies like Otter.ai, Descript and Fireflies.ai making a dent? Our recent interactions with these auto transcription companies indicate that they are clearly not shying away from competition with Windows Copilot or Zoom AI Companion. 

“Our focus is building Fireflies for teams, enterprises, whether you’re a two person team or a 2,000 person organisation. We wanted to be really focused on your core workflows, rather than building a consumer product,” said Fireflies.ai chief Krish Ramineni, in an exclusive interview with AIM. 

“Fireflies has taken notes for over 10 million people across 200,000 organisations. People inside 70% of Fortune 500 have invited Fireflies to take notes for them,” he added. Meanwhile, Otter.ai has transcribed about 1 billion meetings till date. 

Going beyond transcribing meeting notes 

Fireflies.ai told AIM that it is planning to come up with its own AI App Store soon, similar to something like OpenAI’s GPT Store, which was announced recently at DevDay, OpenAI’s first developer conference.

“It’s already live, but we haven’t announced our own AI AppStore,” said Ramineni. 

Simply put, users would be able to build many other apps on top of Fireflies, which means that AI notetaker is just one app of their conversational data platform. “You can build an app that listens to a conversation and then creates a blog post,” he added, in addition to creating follow-up emails based on meeting discussions. 

“We’re focusing on conversational data, and like leveraging a lot of the OpenAI technology and API’s to power these apps that customers are going to be able to use or build for themselves.” he added. 

Interestingly, Fireflies.ai earlier this year introduced AskFred which is integrated with the tech that also powers OpenAI’s ChatGPT. AskFred lets users simply ask questions about what happened during the meeting and receive answers in a conversational style.

“We also have a mobile app that is in beta right now. So that you can now record in-person meetings, not just video conferencing calls,” he said, explaining that the goal of the company is to capture every conversation for users’ convenience. 

Fireflies vs the world 

“The beauty of Fireflies is that it’s able to work across all of these platforms without any sort of change,” said Ramineni. He believes that although Microsoft Copilot and some of these other platforms will be out there doing rudimentary stuff like transcription. He feels the market has moved far beyond transcription at this point in time. “It’s about the workflow. It’s about the integrations. It’s about the use cases,” he added. 

Ramineni told AIM that Fireflies.ai is enterprise-friendly. They have launched private storage, allowing people to own their data and store it on their own servers in their designated locations. “We don’t train our customer conversations by default, we have a special policy in place with OpenAI, which says you cannot retain or train on any of our data,” he added. 

Fireflies is not alone in this space, there are tons of new startups and companies mushrooming using GPT-wrapper, and there is a need for strong differentiation. Citing Otter.ai, Ramineni said it is catering to the most common denominator—voice notes and transcription, and they’re going to see a lot more commoditisation disruption in the space.

“I think, at the end of the day, it’s just like when cloud storage came out in the past, or when mobile apps came out, basic functionality is going to get wiped out and you need to have something that’s more than a basic wrapper, or a basic function,” said Ramineni, adding that SaaS companies need to build real solutions that are more than just a shiny object or hook.

Another biggest USP for fireflies is that it is backed by prominent players in the tech industry. “We work very closely with OpenAI and our investors are also investors in OpenAI, so we have had an opportunity to go really deep on that partnership and bring some of that core technology to customers today,” said Ramineni.

Khosla Ventures‘ investments in both Fireflies.ai and OpenAI enabled Fireflies to integrate ChatGPT’s technology into their platform over the past year.