Granola AI

We've all had that awkward moment where you have to ask, "Hey, are you okay if I record this?"

Granola gets rid of that. It sits in the background, gives you the transcript, and there's no bot joining or awkward announcement. That ends up being way more useful than it sounds, especially on sensitive calls where you can't record audio, but still need to share what happened.

Not to mention, if I am having an interesting conversation in-person, I now just say "Mind if I take notes? What I mean by that is turn on Granola." It's helped me reference back insightful conversations from conferences or networking events.

Another reason we use it so consistently is that it's just very low friction. As soon as you open the app, it literally is one tap, and it's already recording, so you don't have to put too much into it in order to make sure that your conversations are recorded and documented, which is a big part of consistency.

There's also a little floating indicator that stays on your screen so you can always see that it's recording, even if you've jumped to another app. So if you're in another app, it's just sitting there, so you don't have to second-guess whether it's on.

While Granola does all the typical meeting recorder/note taking features you'd expect (e.g. AI meeting summary), they also give you effectively a scratchpad to take ad-hoc notes throughout the call, for which AI enhances all the notes written with further context automatically:

Auto-generated Granola notes in light gray, your enhanced "scratchpad notes" in black

It transcribes everything live, word for word, detects two different speakers, and then once you stop the recording, you just hit "Generate Notes," and it structures everything for you. You still get the full transcript, which we use all the time for pulling exact quotes or dropping into docs.

You can even ask Granola questions mid-call, which uses full context of the call up to that point, or can even come up with contextual questions to ask to help the conversation flowing.

It's really as if you have an active note taking assistant on the call alongside you, helping you keep the conversation flowing. That said, the questions you ask have to pertain to what is said on the call, it will not do outside research currently within the chat.

This is likely to prevent from hallucinations which we have seen happen when comparing Granola vs Cluely.

You have the ability to ask questions specific to the call at hand during the meeting

It works during the meeting and after. If you ran to the bathroom mid-call, come back and type "what did I miss?" or if the engineering team is going deep on something technical and you're lost, just ask "explain what was just said like I'm five."

Every company in the future will have their own version of AGI.

Imagine using Granola for one year, five years, ten years, and having it capture every conversation your team has. You'd be able to look back and see what decisions were made, why they were made, and how those decisions correlated with the growth of the company. Since we've been using Granola for a year, we were able to ask about a year-in-review and it gave us the most accurate possible picture of the state of the business.

Integrate your calendar and the moment a meeting starts, Granola will pop up and ask if you want to record. It even does it for Slack huddles. So it's not another thing you have to remember. It's just there when you need it.

Granola connects with Zapier so you can integrate it with almost anything, and it has an MCP connector that helps you take action after your meetings.

You can set up some pretty powerful automations with Claude.

Some examples from our workflow:

• We have Granola + Claude + Superhuman Mail connected. We ask Claude to check all our call notes for the day and draft follow-up emails for us.
• I went for a walk with my co-founder Alex and we discussed what we wanted to cover at our team meeting. We recorded the conversation with Granola, then I asked Claude to take the notes and create a slide deck for me
• We ask Claude to review our Granola call notes and create Linear tickets for all the bugs we talked about

That said, we'd love Granola to be able to take action for us on it's own. For example, at the end of an engineering call, we'd love it if it could recommend the tickets that came out of the conversation or heck, create them.

For sensitive calls where you can’t record audio but still need to loop someone in, sharing your Granola notes is the much easier, PC way to do it. You're just sending them the summary of what happened, which is a lot more appropriate than sending a recording.

We have a team account, so we organize everything into spaces and can share notes with specific team members. So if we add our engineers, they get access to what's relevant to them and only them.

A small feature I really like is that it automatically groups your meetings by company. You can see all the conversations you've had with a specific client or partner just sitting together, without you having to organize anything. It just happens.

There are templates in Granola if you want more structure in how the notes come out. But truthfully, it's not something we really use. It's there if you want it, and I suppose it's a nice-to-have, but it's not really a core part of how we personally work.

Granola is only available on iPhone at the moment, which I know is a pain for all my Android friends. Alex is an Android user and wishes he could use Granola on his phone. Hopefully it's coming soon!

I've found the Granola mobile app reliable overall. I have a widget on my home screen that allows me to tap once to start a recording. The only thing is, once you stop recording, you can't resume the same recording like on the desktop.

Also as a heads up, you can also record phone calls with Granola!