I let Gemini replace my meeting notes for a week — Fireflies got its job back on Friday

The pitch I tested: why pay for a meeting tool when Gemini can transcribe and summarize from a recording? For one week, every meeting got recorded and fed to Gemini instead of letting Fireflies join. The summaries were honestly good — clear, well-structured, better prose than Fireflies' templates.

The first crack: joining. Fireflies shows up to the call by itself. My Gemini workflow required a person to hit record, export, upload, prompt. On Tuesday, the recording person was out sick and two meetings went uncaptured. On Thursday I forgot to upload until Friday, when my memory of the meeting had already overwritten itself.

The second crack: search. Fireflies builds an archive across every call it has ever attended. 'What did we promise the client about the timeline in March?' is a ten-second question there. Gemini knows about the meetings I remembered to feed it, which by Friday was four of nine.

Where Gemini genuinely won: one-off processing. A 40-minute recorded interview needed a themed breakdown for an article — Gemini did it beautifully, and Fireflies' summary format would have needed rework anyway. Also, sensitive calls where I don't want a bot joining: recording locally and using Gemini keeps the third party out of the room.

Final score: Fireflies keeps the standing job — every meeting, joined automatically, searchable forever. Gemini becomes my on-demand analyst for recordings that need actual thinking. The summaries were better, and it didn't matter, because showing up is 90% of the work.