Fireflies adds dictation to its desktop notetaking apps

Voice AI has gained particular traction for a few consumer use cases: The biggest category is meeting note-taking, and the other is AI-powered dictation, in which filter words are removed and the text is formatted neatly. Fireflies.ai, having gained a solid foothold in the meeting note-taking space, is now venturing into dictation by way of a new feature on its Mac and Windows apps.

Called Fireflies Talk, the dictation feature works just like any of the others on the market like Wispr Flow, Willow or SuperWhisper. Users can press the Fn key on Mac or Ctrl + Win on Windows to start speaking, no matter which app is open, and Fireflies will record their voice and transcribe it neatly in the text field of the app.

“People speak roughly 3x faster than they type, and voice is a much more natural way to get work done. Meetings were just the starting point; the bigger vision has always been Fred as your AI teammate throughout the day. Talk takes Fireflies beyond meetings into email, Slack, docs, prompts, and wherever else you work,” Fireflies CEO Krish Ramineni told TechCrunch over email.

The company has bundled the dictation into its existing subscription plans rather than charging for it separately. This is not entirely a new strategy. Wispr took the opposite route, releasing its meeting notetaker for free for its existing dictation app users. Speechify has also introduced dictation capabilities across different apps.

Fireflies said that the company doesn’t keep any recordings and stores dictation transcripts locally.

Like other meeting notetakers and productivity suites, Fireflies is aiming to automate workflows based on meeting transcriptions and the context it builds on its users, and has plans to build an assistant that taps that context.

Last year, the company introduced “mini-apps” to extract insights in different ways from meetings, and last month, it launched a feature to manage your inbox and draft emails on your behalf.