The Scenario
You run qualitative research for a SaaS product team. You have 20 customer interview recordings — not Zoom calls, raw audio files — stored as URLs in a Google Sheet. The research lead who set up the original workflow left the company six weeks ago, and nobody's quite sure how those recordings were getting transcribed before. You found a note in their handoff doc: "upload to Fireflies." That's it.
The bad version:
- Open Fireflies, navigate to the upload or API section, and figure out how their audio submission endpoint works from the documentation.
- Manually submit each of the 20 file URLs one at a time through the UI or via curl commands, hoping the format is correct.
- Keep a separate scratch doc tracking which URLs you've submitted and which transcript IDs came back, because Fireflies won't match them to your original sheet automatically.
You're a researcher, not an API debugger. The interviews need to be in Fireflies so you can start the thematic coding — sitting in a browser submitting one URL at a time for 20 files is not the job.
The Easy Way: One Prompt in SheetXAI
SheetXAI is an AI agent that lives inside your Google Sheet. It reads the sheet and uses its built-in Fireflies integration to submit your audio URLs for transcription — and write back the transcript IDs it receives — without you touching the API.
Upload each audio file URL in column A of my Interviews sheet to Fireflies for transcription and write the returned transcript ID into column B so I can retrieve the results later.
What You Get
- All 20 URLs in column A submitted to Fireflies for transcription in one pass.
- The transcript ID returned by Fireflies written into column B for each corresponding row.
- Rows where the submission failed (bad URL format, access-denied response) flagged with an error note in column B instead of an ID.
- No guessing which URL maps to which transcript — the IDs are already in the same sheet as your source data.
What If the Data Is Not Quite Ready
Some URLs in column A are blank or are placeholder rows
Upload each audio file URL in column A of my Interviews sheet to Fireflies for transcription, skipping any row where column A is empty. Write the returned transcript ID into column B.
The URLs need an auth token appended before submission
For each URL in column A of my Interviews sheet, append the query parameter "?token=MYTOKEN" before submitting to Fireflies for transcription. Write the returned transcript ID into column B.
You want to check status on the transcript IDs you already wrote back
For each transcript ID in column B of my Interviews sheet, check if transcription is complete and fetch the full sentences text, then paste it into column C.
You want to submit, wait for completion, and pull the text in one shot
Upload each audio file URL in column A of my Interviews sheet to Fireflies for transcription. Once each transcript is marked complete, fetch the full sentences text and write it into column C. If any transcript is still processing, write "In progress" in column C for that row.
The pattern: submit and retrieve in the same prompt where the data is ready, and flag the rows that need a follow-up pull — so you're never guessing what's done.
Try It
Get the 7-day free trial of SheetXAI and open the Google Sheet where you're staging audio file URLs, then ask it to submit them to Fireflies and write back the IDs. For what to do once the transcripts land, see the guide on extracting competitive intelligence from transcripts or go back to the Fireflies + Google Sheets overview.