Problem: Fellow needed quality recordings and transcriptions to offer their customers — but building these solutions internally would take months.
Solution: Recall.ai, a quick-to-implement meeting recorder with powerful diarization capabilities.
Fellow is an AI-powered meeting productivity platform designed to help remote and hybrid teams have fewer, but more effective meetings. The tool makes it easy to collaborate on meeting agendas, track action items, and get the most out of conversations with AI-generated summaries and insights.
Challenge: Finding a way to record, save, and transcribe meeting recordings for remote and hybrid teams
As a meeting productivity platform, Fellow works to streamline collaboration for remote and hybrid teams. But when the team first created Fellow, they didn’t have a deep understanding of the space. Alexandra Sutherland, the Director of Engineering at Fellow, highlighted a bit about their struggle.
“We were just starting to explore the possibility of having a bot that joins meetings to capture the data we wanted — but we weren’t sure where to start,” she said.
So the engineering team created a plan.
The Fellow team would be able to gather all of the audio and video data on the calls, as well as manage the pipeline and save, transcribe, and apply speaker diarization to the recordings… but it would take approximately three months of intense work and multiple full-time employees to bring to life.
“The project was going to require three full-time engineers and an SRE to build, so it would’ve taken a lot of time away from building features for the rest of the product,” Alexandra shared.
That projection didn’t include maintenance, either — which for critical infrastructure like meeting recording, can be significant.
“There’s a lot that goes into maintaining something like this, and it’s extremely important that there’s no downtime. So we were trying to figure out if we need a 24/7 on-call person, ready-to-go at a moment’s notice,” Alexandra explained.
From building to maintenance, creating an internal tool seemed like a steep challenge that Patrick Gingras, a senior software engineer at Fellow, wasn’t sure was worth the investment.
“Our customers care about the value of what we’re providing them. To provide value, we need the meetings recorded, but we really need to spend our time developing the core features of the product — not the implementation details,” Patrick said.
Alexandra and Patrick needed a new solution they could get in place, fast, so they could keep building features to support their customers.
Then they found Recall.ai.
Solution: A fast-to-implement, effective meeting recorder
Recall.ai popped up on Fellow’s radar and immediately resolved their meeting recording needs. Now, Fellow uses Recall.ai to record, save, and transcribe scheduled and ad hoc calls on Zoom, Microsoft Teams, and Google Meet.
It was the right choice for Fellow for a few reasons. Recall.ai is:
Quick
The Fellow team’s initial estimate for bringing their recording tool to market was three months. With Recall.ai, it happened within a week. After anticipating months of extremely difficult work, only to be followed by intense continual maintenance, the Fellow team was thrilled to lighten the burden of meeting recording.
“I felt very relieved from the second I saw the first prototype of Recall,” Alexandra shared. “I had in the back of my mind all the things that could go wrong, but within one demo I saw how happy the engineers were knowing they weren’t having to maintain a complex system. The progress we made was so fast.”
Reliable
It’s vulnerable to trust a third-party API with a piece of critical infrastructure — but building and maintaining an internal tool was going to exhaust the engineering team. Patrick spoke simply about the reliability of Recall.ai.
“Reliability was one of our top priorities and, when we plugged Recall, it just worked. It did what we needed it to do and it let us move on to working on our other features.”
Effective
One major concern the Fellow team faced was speaker diarization; it’s impossible to get strong meeting insights without knowing who is offering what idea. But Recall.ai made it easy for Fellow to provide effective diarization to their customers.
“Recall takes away the pain of diarization completely,” Alexandra said. “It matches up the speakers to their names, transforms the transcript with the data it has about speakers, and sends that to us directly so we don’t need to worry about any of the diarization process.”
Collaborative
Finally, it was important for the Fellow team to find a true partner in creating their software. They needed an API provider that could grow and scale with their company and was willing to adapt to changing needs. Alexandra shared that collaboration was one of the major reasons Recall.ai has been a good fit.
“Their team is extremely open to hearing new ideas, feedback, and thoughts. They’re always willing to collaborate together and come up with new solutions to fit our use case,” she said.
Result: Lowered internal stress and improved time to market
Recall.ai has made a big impact on Fellow’s internal team and on its customers. As a critical part of Fellow’s infrastructure, using Recall.ai has relieved the team and saved time getting the tool to market.
When asked about the benefit of Recall.ai internally, Patrick shared:
“It’s powerful how we don’t have to worry about the recording aspect of things. Ultimately, it’s allowed us to bring more value to our customers, because we can focus on solving the problem we originally set out to solve: leveraging the knowledge that gets trapped in meetings.”
And in regard to time saved, Patrick shed some light on Recall.ai’s impact.
“If I had to guess, we might’ve had four people for several months doing what Recall does for us in a couple of weeks.”
Alexandra added, “ Recall will help you get your product into the hands of customers much faster. It’s a terrific product that I absolutely recommend.”
Between relieving the engineering team, clearing up speaker diarization and meeting recording, and getting their tool to market faster, Recall.ai has made a big impact at Fellow. Looking forward, the companies are excited to continue growing and collaborating together.
