Apps & Consumer
Fireflies adds dictation to its desktop notetaking apps
Fireflies.ai has launched a dictation feature called Fireflies Talk on its Mac and Windows apps, extending the meeting-notetaking company into a second voice AI category.
Voice AI has gained particular traction in two consumer use cases: meeting notetaking, the biggest category, and AI-powered dictation, in which filler words are removed and text is formatted neatly. Fireflies.ai, which has built a solid foothold in meeting notetaking, is now moving into dictation with the new feature on its desktop apps.
Fireflies Talk works similarly to other dictation tools on the market, such as Wispr Flow, Willow, or SuperWhisper. Users press the Fn key on Mac or Ctrl + Win on Windows to start speaking, no matter which app is open, and Fireflies records their voice and transcribes it into the text field of that 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 feature into its existing subscription plans rather than charging separately for it. This isn’t an entirely new strategy in the category: Wispr took the opposite route, releasing its meeting notetaker for free for existing users of its dictation app, while Speechify has also introduced dictation capabilities across different apps.
Fireflies said it 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 from meetings in different ways, and last month it launched a feature to manage users’ inboxes and draft emails on their behalf.
Why it matters
Fireflies bundling dictation into an existing subscription, rather than charging for it separately like some rivals, suggests voice input is becoming table stakes for productivity apps rather than a standalone product category on its own.