Overview
Problem
We are not unlocking the full value of our meetings because we're too busy documenting it to engage meaningfully. Current solutions involve AI bots transcribing meetings so we don't have to, but the transcript outputs are often too long and noisy for users to want to follow up on them.
Challenge
How might we helpfully and accurately eliminate noisy output in AI transcriptions?
Solution
We conceptualized a real-time meeting highlighter for Fireflies.ai that lets users capture important points during a meeting, amidst the natural flow of conversation, so that students, professionals, and teams never lose value to information overload.
SIGNAL
If you hear something you’d like to note down, signal to highlight the last 7 seconds.
KEEP or DISCARDSkim over the highlighted transcript Fireflies provides and choose to keep or discard the highlight.
Receive your summary
At the end of the meeting, you'll be able to access your highlighted notes easily in your Fireflies Notebook!
User research
To better understand how students and professionals navigate the new age of remote/hybrid work, we interviewed students and industry professionals in an user study.
9 interviewees
30-90 minute interviews
- How has your meeting note-taking/participation habits shifted in the past year? past 5 years?
- When was the last time you needed to share meeting takeaways with others?
- Tell me about one of the least/most productive meetings that you remember being in.
“Copying down notes verbatim is a waste of time/energy”
Transcription-form notes are hard to parse and to follow up on. Even with ability to search through transcripts.
“Taking notes in a meeting helps with being present, because otherwise I’d be fidgety.”
If this active processing is what helps meetings stick with participants, how do we extend this processing beyond the notetaker?
How might we reliably separate the signal from the noise in transcription-form notes so that people won’t have to sacrifice extra time and energy post-processing them, and are given a means to stay actively engaged with their meeting?
Solution ideation and prioritization
We came together to generate solution ideas for the challenge and narrowed down our ideas into 3 potential solutions. Based on our evaluations along problem and solution axes (pictured below), we decided on flushing out the "Meeting Highlighter" solution.
Fireflies.ai’s real-time meeting highlighter: Your antidote to information overload
Our solution is lets users capture important points during a meeting, amidst the natural flow of conversation. It is delivered as a feature to the existing Fireflies app, which transcribes meetings and has several transcript parsing features we’ll discuss later on.
User testing
Should we build it?
Hypotheses and Tests
I. PROOF-OF-CONCEPT & USABILITY
A mechanical turk pretotype to provide proof-of-concept and initial usability feedback
II. DEMAND
A demand pretotype to validate market interest
Pretotype Design
Participants joined Zoom meetings in groups of 3 and were asked to plan a birthday cake surprise for a close friend in 10 minutes. Each of the participants were assigned to one person on the experimenter team, who became the participant's dedicated "AI notetaker".
During Meeting
- A user sends "S" via Zoom DM to their notetaker to signal that they wanted to capture the last 15 seconds of the convo.
- Once we receive "S" in our DM, we manually pull Zoom transcripts and sent them back what was said in the last 15 seconds
- User then sends "K" or "D" to keep or discard that transcript
Learnings & Decisions
Users were able to separate signal from noise
Our participants didn’t spam "signal" to "highlight" too many moments in the meeting. With an average of 6 signals in a 10-minute session, our hypothesis that users would be sufficiently discriminatory towards meeting moments is validated.
Preferred and Intuitive
8/9 participants shared preference for this over traditional note-taking after pretotype. Additionally, all participants used the function consistently.
Need to prompt users to save or discard
There was a high “no-act” rate after signaling, which revealed a need to further prompt save and discard actions throughout the meeting.
Additional discoveries and impact on product:
Major Product Decisions
I. Feature or standalone product?
Standalone productvs. additional feature to existing product
Our solution is a feature within an existing product (Fireflies.ai) instead of a standalone product to solve users' pain points across their entire note-taking journey.
About Fireflies.ai
- Records + transcribes meetings with high NLP accuracy.
- Outputs transcription to notebook, where users can search and collaboratively annotate it.
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We ultimately made this decision because:
I. End-to-end value proposition delivery
We’re able to help Fireflies realize their value proposition, and take advantage of its existing infrastructure to deliver the best end-to-end notetaking solution for users – without having to build our own natural language processor or notebook functions.
II. Access to users
Fireflies already has an established user base of more than 10,000 teams. With it, we can enjoy a jumpstart with go-to-market and early product experiments
Here are some of Fireflies' notebook functionalities:
[Click to expand each image]
II. UI Configuration
Standalone web UIvs. 3rd-party application for meeting software
The highlighter would be used as a 3rd party application integrated within the user’s meeting software (i.e. Zoom, Teams), installed from the meeting software's add-on marketplace because our pretotyping feedback revealed that it’s distracting for users to jump between different applications when in a meeting.
III. Feature Set
What key user jobs should our MVP support?
Must-Haves & Nice-to-Haves
Core User Flows
Product Vision
A live highlighter that defies physical constraints
We see our product becoming an essential tool in any setting where knowledge retention is necessary, whether that’s on different meeting platforms or in person.
We see ourselves evolving into a product that can eventually transcend virtual meeting to capture real-time learning in hybrid environments as well - in places like seminars and in-person meetings.
Many of us come to classes and meetings with our devices now - so we can see our meeting-highlighter evolving into an accessible user interface on phone, tablet, and computer. The basic functionalities will remain the same - recording, transcribing, signaling, and saving can happen real-time. The post-meeting productivity boost will work the exact same way.
Price Planning & Expansion Strategy
Subscription-Based Pricing
Because of the usefulness (and thus desirability) of our feature, we believe it’s best to offer as a premium feature, i.e. offered in one of Fireflies’ paid plans.
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We’ve identified our first entry point as professionals and teams because of three reasons:
I. Access
We have easier access to them because Fireflies’ existing user base is mostly in these categories.
II. Impact
Those in industry are likely experiencing higher note-taking pains because they’re in more meetings on a daily basis, so they’d be more elastic in pricing.
III. CAC
Acquiring these types of customers takes less costs and time investments than acquiring enterprise customers.
Go-To-Market Strategy and Expansion Plan
- GTM: includes the traditional marketing and press releases, but will also engage influencers and invite beta testers in a way that will give power users a sense of ownership over our product’s success and design as we continue to develop and grow with their feedback.
- Growth: our offering is a part of a both a B2C and B2B product, so
- B2C: we'll offer free subscription referrals to initiate the flywheel effect, and use networks like HackerNews, growthhackers, and Quibb to attract early adopters in both market segments.
- B2B: get on the grounds at conferences and in grassroots spaces like professional interest groups on FB/LinkedIn/ and Reddit to find early adopters in the coporate settings.
- Competition and Collaboration: meeting software companies may be creating a similar product. However, a strong collaboration with Fireflies (a meeting platform-agnostic tool) gives us unique flexibility (think how integretability allows Zapier maintains a competitive advantage) in order to ship our solution to all other platforms and in hybrid settings. This will allow us to attain our long term goal of being your on-demand, automatic yellow-highlighter in any setting, which is something one-off platforms cannot do.