I Recorded a Meeting Two Ways. Descript and Fireflies Gave Me Different Lies.

I ran the same hour-long client call through Descript and Fireflies to see which I'd keep. They agreed on the words about 90 percent of the time and disagreed completely on usefulness. Descript wants you to edit the recording; Fireflies wants you to search the transcript.

Descript's transcript is clean enough that I cut 'ums' and a wrong sentence straight from the audio, which is magic when you publish the call. But its summary was vague, the kind of 'key points' that could describe any meeting. Fireflies nailed the action items with owners, because it's tuned for exactly that.

Fireflies' lie was subtler: it attributed a decision to the wrong person once, because two people spoke over each other and the diarization guessed. Descript let me hear the overlap and fix it. So Fireflies is faster, Descript is safer when the record matters.

For my weekly standup I keep Fireflies, because I want 'who owns the bug' in thirty seconds. For the podcast-style interview I publish, I keep Descript, because I want to trim it. Using Fireflies for the podcast would mean re-editing in another tool; using Descript for standup wastes the edit features I never touch.

Verdict: Fireflies if meetings are intake you'll search later, Descript if the meeting is content you'll ship. They solve different halves of the same recording.