A Fireflies alternative for in-person meetings: notes for everyone, or coaching for the field

If you are looking for a Fireflies alternative for in-person meetings, start with a fair premise: Fireflies can already capture a face-to-face conversation with its mobile app. The real choice is between a general meeting assistant used by the whole company and a tool built to coach salespeople on the meetings where they sign.

What Fireflies is, and who it fits well

Fireflies presents itself as an AI assistant for meetings. It transcribes, summarises, searches and analyses team conversations, and automates tasks across meetings, email, chat and CRM. Its integrations page lists Google Meet, Microsoft Teams, Zoom, Webex and GoToMeeting among video tools, and CRMs including Salesforce and HubSpot, as well as Redtail and Wealthbox, which financial advisors use. The site states support for more than 100 languages with automatic language detection.

For in-person meetings, Fireflies offers iOS and Android apps to transcribe and summarise conversations in the room, and accepts uploaded audio and video files. Its conversation intelligence features include speaker talk-time, topic trackers and sentiment analysis, and a Live Assist feature offers real-time suggestions during meetings. On security, the site lists SOC 2 Type II, GDPR and HIPAA compliance.

Fireflies is therefore a strong choice for:

• Companies that want one assistant for every meeting, internal and external, video and in person, across sales, recruiting, product and management.
• Teams that work in many languages and need broad transcription coverage more than a sales-specific method.
• Teams whose main need is searchable notes and tasks, synced to the tools they already use.

If that is your need, Fireflies will likely serve you better than a specialised sales tool.

Where a general meeting assistant stops for field sales

The gap for a field team is not capture. It is everything a sales manager needs around it. A general assistant is designed to serve any meeting well, which means it cannot know what a good home visit looks like in your company: which questions come before the offer, which objection your market raises in the third minute of the price discussion, which next step your process requires before the rep leaves the house. Those rules live in your sales method, and a general-purpose assistant has no reason to know them.

The second gap is the client. In field sales, the other person is often a private individual in their own home, not a colleague on a scheduled call. The consent conversation, and what happens to the recording afterwards, matter more there than in an internal meeting. Our guide on recording in-person meetings covers the capture side in detail.

Notes for everyone, or coaching for the sales team

Take an insurance advisor's pension meeting at a client's kitchen table. A general assistant returns a clean summary: needs discussed, products presented, follow-up agreed. A sales coach wants something narrower. Did the advisor establish the client's retirement gap in the client's own words before presenting a product? When the client said they already had an advisor at their bank, what exactly did the advisor reply? Was the next meeting dated before the advisor stood up?

Those questions come from your own method. A coaching tool has to score the meeting against that method, point to the passage where each step was met or missed, and turn the objections that cost deals into practice. That is a different job from note-taking, even when the recording is the same. The article on AI sales roleplay explains how real objections become practice scenarios.

What to check before choosing a Fireflies alternative

Run each shortlisted tool, Fireflies included, on three real appointments from next week, with the clients' consent. Compare what the manager and the rep see the next morning: a summary to file, or a precise list of what to change in the next visit and a way to practise it. Then go through these points:

• Scoring against your playbook. Ask to load your own method and see a real meeting scored against it, step by step.
• Evidence for every coaching point. Each piece of feedback should link to the timestamped passage, so the rep can listen to it rather than argue about it.
• Consent with private clients. How the rep asks, how the answer is recorded, what happens after a refusal.
• What the analytics infer, and about whom. The EU AI Act prohibits AI systems that infer the emotions of people at work, with exceptions for medical or safety reasons. Ask every vendor exactly what their analysis infers from your employees' voices. This is not legal advice; see our article on the AI Act and emotion inference.
• Hosting location. Ask where recordings are stored and processed, in writing.

When MIHOS is the better fit, and when it is not

MIHOS is built only for the in-person sales meeting. It records the meeting with the client's consent, scores it against your own method, links every coaching point to the timestamped passage of the transcript, turns the objections your clients actually raise into AI roleplays, and handles follow-ups, next steps and updates to the CRM fields your admin approves. Recordings are stored in Switzerland. MIHOS uses no voiceprint and no emotion analysis.

It fits insurance and pension advisors, solar and heat pump installers, HVAC, car dealerships, kitchens and home improvement, and security teams, where the deal is signed face to face. The insurance page shows how an advisory network uses it.

It is not the better fit if you want a single assistant for every meeting in the company, internal ones included, or if your sales happen mainly on video. MIHOS is deliberately narrow. In those cases Fireflies, or another general meeting assistant, is the more sensible choice.

Frequently asked questions

Can Fireflies record in-person meetings? Yes. Fireflies states that its iOS and Android apps transcribe and summarise in-person conversations, and that audio and video files can be uploaded.

Is Fireflies a sales coaching tool? Fireflies is a general meeting assistant with conversation intelligence features such as talk-time and topic trackers, and real-time suggestions through Live Assist. Whether it covers your coaching needs depends on how closely you need meetings scored against your own sales method.

Where does MIHOS store recordings? In Switzerland. Ask any vendor you shortlist for the same information in writing, including subprocessors.

Which other tools do field teams compare? See our overview of alternatives and comparisons, written with the same method.