How Fireflies.ai Works: Setup Guide

Setting up Fireflies.ai takes about ten minutes. There is no hardware to buy and nothing to install on a server — you connect your calendar, pick which meetings get recorded, and the notetaker does the rest. Still deciding whether it is worth it? The main Fireflies.ai guide explains what you get. Ready to go? Here is how it goes, step by step.

Step 1: Create your account

Head to fireflies.ai and sign up with your work email or a Google/Microsoft account. The free plan needs no credit card, so you can try the whole thing on real meetings before paying anything. When you are ready to pay, our pricing breakdown compares the four plans.

Step 2: Connect your calendar

This is the key step. Fireflies reads your Google Calendar or Outlook calendar to find your meetings. Once connected, it knows when your calls start and can join them on its own. Without this, you would have to invite the notetaker manually every time — doable, but tedious.

Step 3: Connect your meeting apps

Link the platforms you actually meet on: Zoom, Google Meet, Microsoft Teams, Webex. Fireflies supports all the big ones. You can also connect Slack if you want recaps posted to a channel, and your CRM if you want calls logged automatically.

Step 4: Choose your recording settings

In the settings you decide how the notetaker behaves:

• Auto-join everything — the notetaker shows up in every calendar meeting. Simple, but it will also join your 1:1s and social calls unless you exclude them.
• Join only when invited — you add the notetaker's email to specific meeting invites. More control, slightly more effort.
• Join meetings I host — a middle ground most people end up with.

You can also set the notetaker to announce itself when it joins, which is good manners and in some places a legal requirement.

Step 5: Run a test meeting

Before you use it on a real client call, start a quick meeting with a colleague, let the notetaker join, talk for two minutes, then end the call. A few minutes later check your dashboard and your email — you should have a transcript, a summary, and action items. This is also when you discover things like: does it hear everyone clearly, are the speaker labels right, is the summary actually useful?

What happens during a real meeting

Once it is set up, the flow is boring in the best way. The notetaker joins as a participant (usually named "Fireflies Notetaker"), records quietly, and leaves when the call ends. Nobody has to do anything. A few minutes later the notes land in your inbox and your dashboard, with the recording, transcript, summary, and action items all linked together.

Tips that save you hassle later

• Tell people it is recording. A one-liner at the start — "I've got an AI notetaker on this call, hope that's fine" — avoids awkwardness and keeps you on the right side of consent rules.
• Use a decent microphone. Transcription quality lives and dies on audio. A headset beats laptop speakers in a noisy room every time.
• Skim, don't trust blindly. The summary is a starting point. If a decision matters, click through to that timestamp in the transcript.
• Try AskFred early. Ask it "what were the action items from yesterday's standup?" and you will immediately see why people like this tool.