Fireflies: How to Create and Share Meeting Soundbites

Nobody watches the recording you send them. A fifty minute call with a note saying the important bit is somewhere around minute thirty-two is a request most colleagues quietly decline. A ninety second clip of the customer saying the thing in their own words gets watched every time.

Fireflies calls these Soundbites, and describes them as short audio or video clips made from your meeting recordings or transcripts. They live in their own tab so every clip you have made sits in one place rather than scattered across meetings.

How do you create a Soundbite manually?

Highlight the words in the transcript and click Create Soundbite. Fireflies opens a small panel where you set the title, optionally add it to a playlist, and choose the access level, then you click Done. That is the fastest route and the one you will use most.

There is a second manual route with finer control. Using the plus icon you can open a drag and select mode, where their documentation describes three ways to set the boundaries: dragging the progress bar, moving start and end time sliders, or highlighting the wording in the transcript directly.

Use the transcript highlight when the moment is defined by what was said, and the sliders when it is defined by a pause, a reaction, or a demo where the words alone do not carry it. Their documentation does not state a maximum clip length, so length discipline is yours to impose.

Can Fireflies find the highlights for you?

Yes, in two different ways, and both start from the plus icon. Magic Soundbites asks the AI to detect key moments across the meeting: you click Generate, review what it proposes, and save clips individually or use Save All. Their documentation notes you can also switch on automatic generation so future meetings get this treatment without asking.

Keyword Soundbites works from your terms instead of its judgement. You enter keywords or phrases separated by commas, click Generate, and get clips wherever those terms came up. This is the better tool when you know what you are hunting for, such as every mention of a competitor across a quarter of sales calls.

Whichever generator you use, review before saving. Save All is convenient and it is also how you end up with fourteen clips of pleasantries. Two well-chosen clips from a call are worth more than a folder nobody opens.

Clip a moment and get it in front of someone

1. Open the meeting and find the moment — Work from the transcript rather than scrubbing the audio. Reading is faster than listening, and the transcript is what the clipping tools attach to anyway.
2. Highlight and create — Select the words you want and click Create Soundbite. For finer control over the exact start and end, use the plus icon and the drag and select mode with its time sliders instead.
3. Title it for the person receiving it — Fireflies auto-generates a title, and you can edit it. Write what the clip proves, not which meeting it came from. The recipient does not know your calendar.
4. Set the access level deliberately — Their documentation lists four options: public, teammates only, participants only, and private. Pick before you send, not after somebody forwards it.
5. Group related clips into a playlist — Playlists exist for grouped viewing and sharing. Five clips of five customers describing the same problem is a far stronger artifact than five separate links.
6. Share by link or by email — Open the three-dot menu next to the soundbite. Share lets you enter a name or email and click Invite, and there is a copy link control for pasting it wherever the conversation is happening.
7. Set an expiry if the content is sensitive — Fireflies documents access expiry options of no expiry, 7, 14, or 30 days. For anything involving a customer's words, a dated link is a better default than a permanent one.

Who can open the link you send?

That depends entirely on the access level you set. Fireflies documents four: public, teammates only, participants only, and private. Participants only is the one people overlook, and it is often exactly right, because it limits the clip to people who were in the room and already heard it said.

Their management documentation does not spell out whether an external recipient needs a Fireflies account to open a public clip. Test one link with someone outside your organisation before you send twenty, rather than finding out from a reply asking what a login screen is.

This is also a moment to think about the person who was recorded. A clip travels further than a transcript, and a customer who agreed to a recorded call may not expect thirty seconds of their voice circulating in a prospect deck. Ask them. It is a short conversation and it protects a long relationship.

How do you edit, download, or delete a clip?

All three live behind the same three-dot menu next to the soundbite. Edit lets you change the title, adjust the start and end times, change the selected text, and set the access level, then save. Trimming after the fact is genuinely useful, because the first cut is almost always three seconds too long at each end.

Download gives you the file itself. Fireflies documents audio-only clips downloading as MP3 and video clips as MP4. Bear in mind their pricing page listed video recording as a paid feature rather than a free one when checked on 17 August 2026, so whether you get an MP4 depends on the recording behind the clip.

What are Soundbites genuinely good for?

Three things, mostly. Evidence, when you need a stakeholder to hear a customer say it rather than read your summary of it. Coaching, when a rep handled an objection well or badly and the clip teaches faster than feedback. And handover, when the person picking up an account needs the two minutes that actually matter.

It is a well-built feature for that. The manual clipping is quick, the automatic generation is a reasonable first pass, and the access controls are more thoughtful than most tools bother with.

Where it stops is the same place every notetaker stops. The clip proves the customer wants the integration. Someone still has to write the follow-up, raise the ticket, and tell them when it ships. That handoff is what we removed at Sistava: rather than producing better artifacts about what your meetings decided, you hire an AI Employee, tell it in plain English what should happen next, and it carries the work through. Both approaches are valid, and which you need depends on whether your bottleneck is knowing or doing.

Sources

• Fireflies Knowledge Base, Soundbites, how to extract meeting clips and highlights
• Fireflies Knowledge Base, Managing Soundbites, edit, delete, download, share
• Fireflies Knowledge Base, Learn about Soundbites
• Fireflies pricing page