Fireflies vs. Zoom AI Companion: Why Fireflies Still Wins

​Zoom recently unveiled their rebranded generative AI assistant - Zoom AI Companion.

This revamp of their previous Zoom IQ works across different Zoom products, including meetings, Team Chat, Mail, and Whiteboard.

However, when it comes to meeting assistance, many still prefer Fireflies over Zoom AI Companion as their go-to option. This guide tells you why.

Overview: Zoom and Fireflies.ai 

Zoom, essentially a video conferencing and online communication platform, allows you to conduct virtual meetings, webinars, and web conferences.

Fireflies, on the other hand, is an AI-powered meeting assistant that can record, transcribe, summarize, and analyze conversations on video conferencing platforms such as Zoom or Google Meet or in-person meetings. 

Fireflies streamlines collaboration and meeting documentation processes, making it a valuable tool for any team.

When it comes to meeting assistance, here’s how these two stack up:

Comparing key capabilities of AI Companion for Zoom Meetings and Fireflies.ai

Zoom AI Companion for Meetings attempts to enhance your Zoom meeting experience with the following features:

• AI Companion Questions
• Smart Recording
• Meeting Summary

You can access these features free of cost if you have a paid Zoom Meetings subscription.

AI Companion Questions

It's tough catching up when you miss part of the conversation. Usually, you just jump in blind or ask a colleague to fill you in. 

Both AI Companion and Fireflies.ai let you catch up on conversations instantly by asking questions to the bot without interrupting the meeting. 

However, there are a few differences:

To experiment, we used the AI Companion and Fireflies Fred in the same meeting and asked the bot questions. Here’s the response:

We noticed that Fireflies gave more context than the Zoom AI Companion while answering the questions.

Smart Recording

Both Zoom AI Companion and Fireflies allow you to easily review lengthy meetings using auto-generated highlights of a meeting recording.

Zoom AI Companion segregates meetings into –

• Smart chapters - Automatically group a recording into different sections 
• Recording highlights - Highlights the most important parts of the Zoom session
• Action items  - Flags any action items discussed to follow up on

Fireflies offers a similar, more customizable, easy-to-use version of Zoom Smart Recording with its AI apps, especially Magic Soundbites, Meeting Outline, and Action Items. 

Magic Soundbites automatically identifies and snips out relevant Meetings sections for you as easily shareable audio or video snippets with transcripts.

You can also configure Magic Soundbites to generate highlights only by focusing on the content that is relevant to you. 

For instance, we prompted Magic Soundbites to create highlights that are only professionally relevant from a one-on-one meeting, and here’s the result:

Similarly, the Fireflies Meeting Outline app, by default, provides time-stamped notes of the meeting, divided into chapters. 

Whereas the Action Items app highlights all the action items discussed during the meeting. 

You can change the default prompts and customize the Meeting Outline and Action Items apps to produce outputs with only the details that matter to you in any preferred format. 

Here are some key differences between Zoom Smart Recording and Fireflies AI apps:

Fireflies automatically categorizes your meetings into three default channels. You can create more public or private channels based on your Fireflies plan to make information retrieval easy. 

Meeting Summary

Meeting Summary by AI Companion gives you a quick AI-generated overview of your Zoom sessions. The meeting host must manually start the meeting summary through the in-meeting controls. It is a stand-alone document; the generated summaries are in the Meeting Summary with AI Companion section. 

The Summary is in a paragraph format, covering all key information discussed in the conversation.

On the other hand, Fireflies provides a more structured overview of the conversation with its AI Super Summaries. It has 5 main parts:

• Keywords - Auto-identifies important keywords discussed
• Meeting Overview - Short gist of the entire meeting
• Meeting Outline - Meeting outline with timestamp links
• Bullet notes - Condensed, actionable bullet points
• Action items - Summary of assigned tasks and owners

You can further tweak the output of Fireflies Super Summaries to highlight only the details you want by customizing the prompts.

Here are some major differences between meeting summaries by Fireflies and Zoom AI Companion:

Here’s a summary of a meeting generated by both tools:

The summaries generated by both tools are fairly good. However, Fireflies' summary stands out for its scannability, thanks to its bullet-pointed, 5-part structure. In contrast, the Zoom AI Companion summary provides only a high-level overview of the discussion, leaving out some major details.

For instance, the Zoom summary failed to mention Sam's absence from social events and focused solely on the leadership training program. Fireflies' more comprehensive summary covered the full breadth of the conversation in an easy-to-digest narrative format. It touched upon every significant point raised, from Sam's lack of participation to the pros and cons of the training initiative.

Here’s an example:

Other features that make Fireflies stand out

• Transcription accuracy
• Smart search capabilities
• Conversation intelligence and meeting analytics
• Integrations

1. Transcription accuracy

Fireflies uses the most advanced speech recognition technology, and its transcripts are over 90%+ accurate. It supports over 3 English accents and 60+ languages, including Portuguese, Spanish, French, Arabic, German, Dutch, and Italian.

Fireflies is also very fast; you can access your transcripts just a few minutes after your meetings or after uploading your recording.

2. Smart Search capabilities

Along with the basic keyword search, Fireflies also offers advanced Smart Search capabilities that allow you to filter through your transcripts and find relevant information faster and easily.

These AI-generated filters let you review the transcript based on sentiments, speakers, topics, questions, tasks, etc.

3. Conversation intelligence and meeting analytics

Fireflies Conversation Intelligence feature analyzes transcripts, quantifies conversations, and extracts actionable insights to help you make better, more informed decisions.

It spots trends in topics discussed, talk patterns, sentiments, etc., such as total meetings, duration, number of filler words used, talk-to-listen ratios, monologues, silence periods, sentiments, questions asked, and more. 

The metrics quantify conversations so you can see what's really going on. 

Fireflies also lets you filter the results of this analytics data based on meeting type, participants, host, name, date, duration, etc.

Additionally, you can create and track topics, phrases, or keywords across your meetings using Fireflies’ Conversation Intelligence feature. 

For instance, you want to monitor key subjects like pricing, objection handling, competitors, or product features. 

Add these topics to the Topic Tracker, and Fireflies Topic Insights will give you an overview of how often these topics were mentioned across how many meetings. 

Click on the topic to jump to those meetings and view the full transcript to gain more context.

So, if you create a topic for "AI transcription" Fireflies will pinpoint every discussion about AI transcription across all your meetings. 

In contrast, Zoom offers a conversation intelligence add-on for Zoom Meetings and Zoom Phone with Zoom Revenue Accelerator. It analyzes calls and meetings to provide meaningful metrics that can improve customer experience and sales team performance.

Here’s a quick comparison:

4.  Seamless integrations

Integrating with over 40+ business apps like Zoom, Google Meet, Tello, Slack, Asana, etc., Fireflies helps make your existing tech stack and workflow more efficient. For instance,

• Fireflies-Slack integration lets you automatically send meeting notes, transcripts, and recordings to any Slack Channels. 
• Fireflies-Trello integration enables you to create Trello tasks with simple voice commands during meetings.
• Fireflies-HubSpot integration allows you to automatically log meeting notes, calls, and customer details directly into your HubSpot CRM.

Zoom offers over 1000+ integrations. However, Zoom being a video conferencing tool at its core, these integrations mainly focus on easily scheduling and conducting meetings. 

For instance, Zoom-Slack integration lets you start an instant meeting or join a scheduled meeting through slash commands in your channels. However, it does not send any post-meeting notes or follow-ups once the meeting ends, which Fireflies does automatically.

Concluding the debate: Fireflies or Zoom AI Companion, which fits you best?

Apple products are great. Sophisticated, sleek designs and performs perfectly. But for the best experience, you must stick to the iOS universe—iPhones, MacBooks, Airpods, etc.

You can’t have a Windows laptop and expect it to sync flawlessly as a MacBook will with your iPhone, even with the best-supporting software tools.

The same way, if you're a Zoom fanatic, use every Zoom product and no other, and have no conversations outside the Zoom-verse, then the Zoom AI Companion can do wonders and be your best colleague.

But if you need an AI assistant that works for you anywhere you want, gives the most accurate outputs, doesn't pause any limitations, and is highly secure, Fireflies it is.