Can You Ask Your AI Notetaker What You Missed While the Meeting Is Still Going?

The short answer

Yes. Granola, Fireflies and Driffle all let you ask about a meeting while it is still running. Typing "what did I just miss?" five minutes after you joined late works on all of them.

The useful differences are elsewhere. Some tools put your question and the answer where everyone on the call can see or hear them. And a mid-meeting answer can only use what the tool has transcribed so far, sometimes only the recent part of it. Those two details decide whether you can trust the feature on a client call.

Who sees the question

Granola runs on your computer with no bot in the call. Its docs say the chat for a single meeting works before, during or after the meeting, and that your chat history is private: if you share the note, your chat about it is not shared. Your question stays on your screen.

Fireflies has two ways in, and they behave very differently. Its desktop app opens a floating panel when it starts capturing, with prompts such as Catch Up and Action Items and its AskFred chat. That panel is yours, and Fireflies says it is hidden from screen sharing by default, which is worth testing with a colleague before you rely on it.

The other way is Talk to Fireflies, where you say "Hey Fireflies" or type /ff in the meeting's own chat on Zoom, Google Meet or Teams. Fireflies' guide says a voice question gets its answer in voice and in the chat, it posts a message in the chat when the feature is on so everyone knows it is active, and any participant on the call can use it. The chat setting is on by default, and the voice trigger and spoken replies are switched on with it unless an admin has turned them off.

That is fine for a team standup. On a sales call, "/ff what did they say about budget?" is a question your buyer can read, and the reply lands in front of them too. If your company uses Fireflies, check these three settings before a call where that matters.

How much of the meeting the answer read

After a meeting, a notetaker has the whole processed transcript to work from. During the meeting it has a live transcript that is still being written, and each tool decides how much of it to hand the model with your question. None of the vendor pages above say how much that is.

Here is what Driffle does, from its shipped code. A question asked in a meeting that is still recording reads the most recent part of the live transcript, by default the latest 12,000 characters with speaker names attached. At a normal speaking pace that is roughly the last ten to fifteen minutes of conversation. Once the call ends and the notes are written, Ask searches the full transcript instead.

For "what did I just miss?" that window is exactly right. It matters for other questions. At minute 50 of an hour long call, "what did they say about pricing?" will not see a number from minute 5, and "list the action items so far" will list the ones from the recent stretch. A tool that does not tell you where its window ends can give you a confident, partial answer that reads like a complete one.

A test to run in a trial

Book a 45 minute call with a colleague. In the first two minutes, have them say a specific number out loud, such as a price or a date. At minute 40, ask the notetaker what that number was, then ask it to list every action item so far. If it misses the early number, you have found its window.

In the same call, ask one question the way you normally would and have your colleague say whether anything showed up on their side, in the chat, in audio, or on a shared screen. Two questions, and you know what the feature actually does.

What to check before you repeat an answer out loud

A live answer is built on words that were transcribed seconds ago, and names and numbers are the words most worth checking. Before you say "so we agreed on 40 seats" to the room, glance at the transcript line the answer came from. A tool that shows where its answer came from makes that a two second check.

How it works in Driffle

While Driffle is recording a meeting, the Ask box at the bottom of the note shows one tap prompts: What did I just miss?, Make me sound smart, and List action items. You can also type any question about the call. Driffle has no bot in the meeting, so nothing is posted to the meeting chat and nothing is spoken; the question and answer stay in Driffle on your Mac. That window does appear in a full screen share, so share a single window when you present.

Mid-meeting answers use the recent stretch of the transcript described above, and the full meeting once the notes are written. Driffle runs on Macs with Apple Silicon, and transcription and the AI run in the cloud. If you want to try asking it mid-call yourself, you can get Driffle at driffle.ai/download.