Fireflies Email Assistant Makes Inbox Work Simpler (Full Transcript)

[00:00:00] Speaker 1: am the worst at answering emails.

[00:00:31] Speaker 2: And for our very first episode, I'm really excited to have Lea here with me, who's been working on the email assistant. Hi Lea, thanks for joining. Do you want to introduce yourself?

[00:00:42] Speaker 1: Hey Mariam, thank you so much for having me. My name is Lea and I am one of the PMMs here at Fireflies. And my job is basically to be the voice of the product to our customers, to our audience, and also be the voice of our customers and audience to the product. So what you'll find me doing is translating what the product can do out to the market, and then also getting a lot of feedback from people and hopefully applying that to the product. So that's my job. And one of the products that I take care of within the Fireflies ecosystem is email assistant, which is why we're here today.

[00:01:19] Speaker 2: So tell me a little bit more. How did you end up working on email, of all things? How did that come about?

[00:01:27] Speaker 1: I have to confess, and this is actually embarrassing to say on video, but I am the worst at answering emails. I'm literally that friend who will not get back to people for two to three business days. And obviously that's one thing when it's your WhatsApp messages or a message on Instagram to your friends, but it's a totally different thing when you're at work and you need to answer emails in a timely fashion. And when the team started working on email assistant and I saw what it was able to do and I saw how it was able to help people, I was like, oh my God, this is something that would really help me because I can't afford to be overthinking my email replies for an entire week. I need to be like this. I need to be quick. So yeah, when the opportunity came up, I was like, okay, I want to work on this. This will be something that's really fun to PMM, and that's how I ended up on email assistant. And of course, not just me, of course. I work hand-in-hand with an amazing PM. Shout out to Pallav and our team of engineers. So yeah, I'm just part of a great team.

[00:02:27] Speaker 2: By the way, Guilty, I am so bad at replying to email messages, emails, I'm really not that good at it. So I can definitely relate. But tell me what is the email assistant? Just try to explain it to someone who basically wouldn't really get it from the name.

[00:02:49] Speaker 1: Yeah, let me explain what it does. So basically the Firefly's email assistant, it's in your inbox, and it sorts your emails for you. So it labels them according to priority. So you get a cool little label. And so that means that when you look at your inbox, at a glance, you know what you need to tackle first, you know what you can leave till later, which is super helpful. And what is my favorite feature is that it automatically drafts replies for you. So you'll open the email thread, and there will be this auto draft that's just waiting for you to take a look at, maybe edit a little, and send. So you don't have to do these things from scratch anymore. And another really cool feature is that it will pick up when somebody hasn't replied to you for a few days. And you can set that in the settings, however many days you want that to be. But it picks up when somebody hasn't replied to you, like a thread has gone quiet, essentially. And then it drafts a reply, and it flags it to you. And it's like, oh, you need to follow up with this person, which is super helpful, because that's another thing that I probably tend to do, is send an email, and then completely forget that somebody hasn't replied to me. And a couple of weeks pass, and it'll be the middle of the night, and I'll be like, I forgot to follow up with that person, and now it's too late, or it's embarrassing. So, yeah.

[00:04:01] Speaker 2: It's terror. Like, it's literally, I can, oh my God, are we the same person? Because I can so relate to that feeling, where you're like, and then you feel so, like, I don't know about you, but I feel so bad even getting back where I'm like, at a point where I'm like, maybe I shouldn't reply at all. You know? Maybe it is now.

[00:04:19] Speaker 1: Like, too much time has passed.

[00:04:21] Speaker 2: Maybe it's too late. It's too late. I have to let go. Because it's, at some point, I think it does become embarrassing to be like, hi, after three months. No, I don't know. I'm not going to confess how long.

[00:04:33] Speaker 1: We would never forget to follow up for three months. No, never.

[00:04:36] Speaker 2: Never work emails, okay? No. Never.

[00:04:39] Speaker 1: That's what email assistant is great for. You don't have to keep track of all those things manually. Like, it'll just tell you, which is awesome. So, yeah.

[00:04:47] Speaker 2: No, that's super cool. Like, I know you sort of touched on it, but like, what was, like, why do you know the thinking behind why we built an email assistant or like? Yeah, for sure. What were, yeah.

[00:05:00] Speaker 1: I think, yeah. I think that's an interesting one, because obviously for a really long time, we were known as a note taker. We were one of the first note takers in the category, right? So Fireflies is just associated with note taking, but Fireflies can do so much more than that. And it's really become this like AI teammate that can handle work for you all over the place, like wherever work is happening. And one of the main places that work happens for most people is in email. So after years of helping people, you know, keep track of their meetings and figuring out what their tasks were that came from those meetings and then even taking action on those tasks, we were like, why not take that same technology and put it in people's inboxes and help them stay on top of their inboxes? So that's how we kind of came to the decision to, okay, let's create an email assistant and let's really help people. And yeah, that's basically how it happened just earlier this year.

[00:05:54] Speaker 2: Who was like the person you, or who was in your head or in your mind when you or the team was building the product? Like who is this exactly for?

[00:06:06] Speaker 1: Okay, that's a really interesting question because it can be for so many people. But the people that I'm always thinking about when I'm working on email assistant is anybody that has a day job that takes up so much time and effort and energy that it doesn't actually leave a lot of extra time to take care of the admin that the work creates. And let me give you an example of that. So you probably don't know this. I don't know if I've ever told you this, but many years ago, when I started my career in tech and startups, I was actually in sales. I had a very brief stint in sales. I'm not a sales expert by any means. I did one year of sales and I was selling tickets to an HR tech conference. So it was like telesales. And we were under a ton of pressure at the time to be on as many calls as possible. So there were inbound leads and then there was outbound prospecting as well. And I remember so distinctly that at the time, any minute that you spent that was not on calls really felt like a minute wasted because that was you losing the opportunity to close deals and make revenue for the company. And then there's a bunch of stuff that you have to do apart from being on calls, which takes a lot of energy and a lot of brainpower. So you were supposed to be updating the CRM. You were supposed to be using LinkedIn to find other leads, working on marketing materials and all that kind of stuff, working with other teams in the company, doing sales trainings. And it was like, how could we possibly fit all of that into one working day? So I only did that for a year, like this high call volume kind of role. And I think about people who spend many years in roles like that and how tiring it must be because you finish your workday and then you have a bunch of admin and a bunch of emails to do on top of the entire very full, very tiring workday that you just had. And those are the people that I think of. And if I put that into more concrete terms just to give people more context, more ideas, it's people who work in sales. It's people who work in recruiting. It's consultants. It's executives, freelancers, just anybody who has a lot of calls and a lot of emails and doesn't necessarily want to be piecing all the different parts together to stay on top of everything and get back to people. And that's one of the reasons that Firefly is great, right? Because it has all the context from all your calls and emails. So you're not sitting there at the end of the day, tired, like, oh, I just wish I could go home and hang out with my family or whatever it is you want to do after work. And instead, you're answering a bunch of emails and you're trying to remember, okay, what happened in that thread and what did we discuss on that call? All of that, Firefly is nose for you. You don't have to stay on top of a manual anymore, which is, if I had had something like that 10 years ago, you better believe I would have been unstoppable.

[00:08:54] Speaker 2: No idea. You were in sales. That's crazy. Like, every time I speak to you, I get to know a new little factoid about you that always surprises me more than the...

[00:09:03] Speaker 1: The lore is deep. There's a lot of lore.

[00:09:07] Speaker 2: So I was like, oh, wow, that's cool. Let's sort of, like, break it down a bit. If someone were to connect the email assistant tonight, what would be different tomorrow, for example, for them in a day-to-day kind of way?

[00:09:23] Speaker 1: For sure. I think that's a great question because this might be a little confusing for some people at first. Because when you connect email assistant, it's not that it automatically starts sorting through all your old emails, which is also good because I know that some people were afraid or maybe, like, reluctant or hesitant to use an email assistant because they think they'll connect it and then all of a sudden it'll delete all your emails in some kind of, like, rogue agent situation, which is really not the case. So you're going to connect it, and it will start applying all the settings that you've set to new incoming emails, right? So at first you're actually not going to see much, but as the hours pass and as emails enter your inbox, it starts labeling them according to priority, it starts drafting replies for them, and then if you've sent an email out and it picks up that you need to follow up on it, it will start drafting those follow-ups and flagging them for you as well. So how much you see and what you see it doing also depends a little bit on the rules you set. And I can talk a little bit to that now because those are not live yet. So this is a really highly requested feature. And by the time this video goes out, they will be live, so I hope it's okay that I'm talking about them right now. But, yeah. So this is exciting because this is something that users have been requesting since August, since we launched email assistants. I'm really excited that we're actually going live with them now. But basically all the rules that you're able to set in your Gmail, in your Outlook, whatever it is that you're using, you can now set those directly in Firefly. So if you want, for example, any time that this person or this company sends you an email that you want to draft or you don't want to draft for these emails, or you want it to be moved to a specific folder, or you want it automatically deleted or automatically archived, whatever the case is, you can set those rules now directly in Firefly, which is awesome. So all your rules and logic, you can do it directly from the dashboard, which is really cool.

[00:11:14] Speaker 2: That's super cool. I think I've been waiting for that myself. So I'm super excited to see what that looks like on a day-to-day as well. But I want to know a little bit more about, for those people who are, let's say, not familiar with how it would work, how does the email assistant decide what matters? For example, what needs action? Or what is this conversation? Does this conversation need a response? How is it going to decide that? And what does the user see?

[00:11:49] Speaker 1: Okay, yeah, for sure. Let's talk about it. So basically, it's the same tech that we've developed and used for years that reads through your meeting transcripts and is able to pull out your action items and open questions. The exact same tech is what's going into your inbox and reading your emails. And when we first launched email assistant, we had a bunch of different labels. We decided to simplify it. So now the labels that we have are needs action, conversations, pending, and we have a brand new label, which I'm also really excited about, which is called suspicious, which I know is very mysterious. I love that. Yeah, so basically, this all came from a Slack conversation. So like most companies, I know you know we have this channel, we have a channel where we share phishing attempts just to raise awareness of them in case anybody's getting the same ones in their inbox. And yeah, being at Firefly's, we get a lot of people trying to send us phishing emails. And somebody posted a phishing, some phishing attempt, and then we're chatting about it in the thread, and somebody puts in the thread, like, what if email assistant could flag those for people? And we were like, oh my god, how did we not think about that? So just over the last couple of weeks, the team actually introduced this, that now we have a new label for emails that look suspicious to help flag them to people. And yeah, I'm really excited about this. That's our first label.

[00:13:11] Speaker 2: I'm so curious to see that. Like, I'm so, yeah, that's actually really...

[00:13:17] Speaker 1: I think it'll be really helpful. Yeah. Yeah. So yeah, basically, it reads through the emails, gets an idea of what the contents are, and then what you'll see in your inbox are one of those four labels. And brand new, sorry, I know I'm dropping all these, like, all these new things.

[00:13:34] Speaker 2: Please give us all the deets, yeah.

[00:13:36] Speaker 1: All the deets, all the tea. So this is also coming out next week. I think I should be safe to talk about it. But we are also introducing custom labels. So you can basically set the labels. So we have these simple labels right now because the goal was to not clutter anybody's inbox up, right? But people should be able to organize their emails the way that they want to, which is why we introduced rules, which is why we're introducing custom labels. So now you'll be able to decide exactly what those labels should say. If you want them to be, like, very professional and simple, or if you want them to be funny and unhinged, like, it is totally up to you. And yeah, people can set those now in the settings dashboard for Email Assistant.

[00:14:16] Speaker 2: I'm so excited for that one as well. And I know I keep saying that, but that one particularly, because I feel like I get very different types of emails. Exactly. So I think that's a super, super useful feature. I want to, like, I want to know more about, like, the response or responding feature. Like, how does the Email Assistant decide?

[00:14:42] Speaker 1: You mean the auto drafts, right?

[00:14:44] Speaker 2: Yes. Yeah. I was trying to say it in a different way, but the auto draft. How does it decide your tone or how does it decide what the draft would look like?

[00:14:58] Speaker 1: Yeah. So basically in the dashboard where you customize all your settings, this is where you decide which kind of emails get a draft, how many days after you send an email you want a follow-up to be flagged. We also have this little field called writing instructions. And basically you just, you give it the instructions that you want it to follow there. It is so simple and straightforward. So if you have a preferred email opening, if you have a preferred email closing, if you want the tone to be more formal, less formal, if you want to use a certain kind of, you can determine the languages as well there, for example, that's where you decide the kind of style that it'll follow. It's almost like giving it a little style guide, right? And then once you put those writing instructions in, that's what it will follow and that's how it will make your drafts sound more like you. And the other way that I would say that it manages to write in your voice, it's all about context, right? So the email assistant has context from your calls. It has context from any other tools that you may have connected to Fireflies, whether that's like a CRM or a project management tool like Notion. And it has context from the rest of your email thread. So that's also helpful.

[00:16:20] Speaker 2: Wait, I think your mic is a little...

[00:16:24] Speaker 1: Is this better? I was actually just trying, the sun is coming through at the most awkward angle. Let me adjust.

[00:16:30] Speaker 2: Yeah.

[00:16:32] Speaker 1: It's like creating some stripes on me.

[00:16:34] Speaker 2: It's like creating a little bit of distortion sound suddenly.

[00:16:38] Speaker 3: Let me sit for a minute. Let me see if it's a little better. Is this better?

[00:16:45] Speaker 2: And this intermission was brought to you by Technical Difficulties. So we'll be right back. Okay, so we're back after some expected, no, not expected, technical difficulties from our first episode. Yeah, so we're gonna try to catch up from where we left off. Just to clarify, does it store any data from your inbox? Like do people's, does people's data, do people's, does people's data, oh my God, stay safe. Have I said it the right way? Yep. Yeah.

[00:17:24] Speaker 1: So does it stay private, basically?

[00:17:25] Speaker 2: Yes, exactly.

[00:17:27] Speaker 1: So, yeah, we use the same security for all the features and all the products in the Firefly's ecosystem. So basically, we can't see any of your content or data. We don't use customer data to train any of our models. And you ownership of all of it. So, yeah, your data and your all private, it's secure. You're in good hands.

[00:17:54] Speaker 2: So that should also answer the question of anyone who's out there thinking, is it gonna start like replying to my, or signing contracts on my behalf? Like none of that's happening.

[00:18:06] Speaker 1: No, none of that. This is not a rogue agent. This is Firefly's. It's an AI teammate. And you, rules, you're in the driver's seat, right? So it's not sending anything without your permission. If you would like the email assistant to automatically delete something for you, which some people do, you can set up that rule in the dashboard, but it's not gonna go into your inbox deleting things and deleting things without your permission. So yeah, not something you need to worry about, which is great. Because that would be really stressful.

[00:18:39] Speaker 2: Yeah, exactly. Great. Thank you so much. Like, I feel like I've gotten to know some very interesting details. Also, what's upcoming, like some behind the scenes, because, you know, like there's so much going on at Firefly's. And I, like, enjoyed this conversation so much because I also got to know about some of the new features that are launching soon. And I'm super excited to use them and see, you know, how they can make my life simpler.

[00:19:12] Speaker 3: I'm super, yeah, I'm super curious.

[00:19:15] Speaker 2: Thank you for teaching me about email assistant. Like, I feel like you worked so hard and the team worked so hard on such a cool product. I really recommend everyone who hasn't used it just to go and test it out. I feel like it will definitely make your life easier. It's definitely going to make things simpler for you. Do you have any final closing statements about anything? It's been grandiose and dramatic.

[00:19:45] Speaker 1: I think, like you said earlier, of course, email assistant is really useful for people whose day jobs are super busy and they don't really have the time to deal with admin after whatever their core function is. But it's also just for people like me who work emails till they die. Or for people who have writer's block and they need a little bit of inspo with their drafts. Or for people who want to wake up in the morning and look at their inbox and be like, okay, I know exactly what I need to tackle first. And that helps you feel good in the morning, like you're on top of things. So there's so many different types of people that email assistant can help. And yeah, we're excited for you guys to try it and let us know what you think. And we're always working on improving it. So hopefully this will help everybody get more work done and get some time back to focus on other things instead of just cleaning up their inboxes for hours. So that's the goal.

[00:20:42] Speaker 2: Absolutely. Thank you so much, Leah, for everything. For walking us through it. For sharing a little bit about your personal inbox as well. Thank you for being my first guest. This was very cool. You're so welcome.

[00:20:55] Speaker 1: It was so much fun chatting. And yeah, till the next one. Likewise. Bye. Bye-bye.

[00:21:05] Speaker 2: And this intermission was brought to you by the technical.

[00:21:09] Speaker 3: How formal should this be? Good morning, my fellow, my fellows.

[00:21:18] Speaker 1: What?

[00:21:19] Speaker 2: Dogs like do people's uh does people's data do people's does people's data oh my god stay safe. Have I said it the right way?

[00:21:28] Speaker 1: Mariam. Sorry. Sorry to stop you, but I've just noticed that I think you need to put like do you want to put your full name and then your job title on this little square thing so it appears?

[00:21:40] Speaker 2: 100%. Yes.

[00:21:40] Speaker 1: How do I change that? Yeah.

[00:21:42] Speaker 2: No, I think I think Sorry, go ahead. We were we were doing you were doing amazing, sweetie. Like you you really were, but We both were.

[00:21:53] Speaker 3: Let me sit for a moment since it's going to be very short. Is this better? No.