Even as industries scramble to find ways to incorporate Artificial Intelligence applications into their workflows, one use case has seen particular success: AI notetakers. Notetaker bots sit in on conversations like Zoom calls and transcribe participants’ remarks. Since the generative AI wave took off, such services, like Fireflies.ai and Otter, have seen a surge in their usage.

Fireflies.ai, an early entrant in the market headquartered in California, has seen its business among Indian companies grow eight times in the last year, Krish Ramineni, the firm’s CEO, told The Hindu in an interview. Mr. Ramineni said that over 30,000 firms are using Fireflies to transcribe meetings and summarise multiple conversations to keep managers apprised of developments. The firm has seen rapid growth in recent years, and told The Hindu that it has seen 600% growth globally in the last two years.

The market is competitive — while upstarts like Fireflies and Otter have held their ground, established giants in the office productivity space like Microsoft and Google have worked to integrate similar features into their respective products. Mr. Ramineni said that his company had built an app store to add features on top of Fireflies’s base product, and touted partnerships with ChatGPT developer OpenAI and Anthropic, the competing firm that develops the Claude chatbot. 

Mr. Ramineni said that one category of firms had particularly warmed to notetakers — unicorn start-ups account for a major portion of Fireflies’s customers. The company says over 60% of India’s unicorn start-ups have employees using the product.

Reliance Industries Ltd. announced last month that even Jio would get in on the action, with a product called Jio PhoneCall AI, which would sit in as a conference call participant and take notes on calls automatically.

The use case still has its challenges — the main players still do not offer Indian rupee prices for Indian businesses, and voice recognition models are still not fully capable of handling speakers switching between different languages in the same meeting, or speaking in blends like Hinglish. (Doing so would require far more computational power, Mr. Ramineni explained, but it was something he said his firm was eager to bring to the market.) Mr. Ramineni declined to break out revenue numbers for India.

The notetaker use case’s runaway success comes even as other hues of complete automation haven’t played out yet. Firms focusing on AI have recognised this: Microsoft’s branding of its Copilot product as a companion, as opposed to an autonomous agent running unsupervised.