Granola

What Granola does

Granola is a note-taking application for meetings that records system audio on your own device and combines what you type during the call with the transcript to produce a structured summary afterwards. Because it does not join calls as a participant, there is no visible bot in the meeting, which suits sensitive conversations and external calls where a recording notice is awkward. Notes are searchable across meetings, can be asked questions collectively, and templates shape the summary for recurring formats such as interviews or sales calls. Shared folders let teams pool notes. It suits founders, consultants, researchers and sales people in back-to-back calls. The limitations are platform and consent: it is desktop-first with the strongest support on macOS, it depends on capturing system audio so headphone and permission configuration matters, and not appearing as a participant does not remove your obligation to tell people they are being recorded.

How to use it

Download the desktop application from granola.ai and grant the microphone and system audio permissions it requests, which is the step that most often goes wrong and results in silent transcripts. Connect your calendar so meetings appear automatically. During a call, type sparse notes as you normally would, since the tool is designed to enhance fragments rather than replace attention; after the meeting ends, it merges your notes with the transcript into a structured summary within a minute. Choose or create a template for recurring meeting types so summaries come back in the same shape each time. Afterwards you can ask questions across all your notes, which is more useful than any single summary once you have a few weeks of history. Two things to handle deliberately: tell participants you are recording, and check the audio source setting if you switch between headphones, external microphones and conference room hardware. Export or copy anything you must retain formally, since a note-taking application is not a system of record for contractual commitments.

Best for

• back-to-back meetings
• client calls
• user interviews
• sales notes
• searchable meeting history

Strengths and limitations