Granola vs Dialpad Meetings

Granola is a meeting recorder tool that doesn't require those annoying bots to join. In-fact the people you're on the call with don't even have to know you're using it.

Interestingly enough, this isn't any different than just having a note taker on the call, because they don't allow you to playback the audio. What you can do is ask Granola's AI Chatbot questions about the call, or any calls you've had across the company.

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, and researching further context details when needed.

We make sure to always have Granola recording our meetings (even in-person team meetings and brainstorming meetings), even if we have one of the best AI note taker bots joining the call as well. It's just a more lightweight solution that can't be kicked from calls and is less invasive.

I was actually one of a few people back in the day that tried to make the pivot from Google Meet and Zoom to Dialpad Meetings (formerly UberConference) happen.

The thing is, at the time, there was just too much friction trying to get people to use and accept Dialpad Meetings, because it's just different from what they are used to using (thank you inertia /sarcasm).

• You can have it automatically join your calls in Dialpad Meetings, but Google Meet and Zoom as well, it's super flexible in that way.
• They are likely to be a bit more advanced than even that of Dialpad Meetings, since they are solely focused on just the meeting AI side of things, whereas Dialpad Meetings needs to also support the entire infrastructure of a meeting platform.
• If you ever do choose to leave Dialpad Meetings and move back to Zoom/Google Meet, your historical lock-in is on a 3rd party tool (Fireflies), instead of the meeting platform itself. So with Fireflies, you can jump between Dialpad Meetings to Google Meet to Zoom, no problems!

• You're now going to be paying for a second meeting recorder to join the call, and the integration will be linking your CRM and notes from what Fireflies comes up with, not Dialpad Meetings.
• It'd definitely a bit less clean. Also, Fireflies will join the call as a fake person, that's how they record the call.

So all-in-all, we know this isn't the most ideal thing to hear. Without Dialpad Meetings having a proper API though (or a native CRM integration), that's all we can really do here.

If the above is you, all I can say is we hear you... It's overwhelming, confusing, and we were going down this exact same rabbit hole 6+ years ago.

Dialpad Meetings is quite clean, we've always appreciated the simplicity it brings with it. I appreciate them coming at it with a more modern approach, but with that, comes more difficult user-adoption (unless you just copy Google Meet and Zoom identically).

This is where we've ran into the most struggles with Dialpad Meetings. It's just not familiar with most people when joining. They don't know where the screensharing icon is, along with everything else. It's just different from what people are used to. While this is normally fine and we don't want to be too negative on Dialpad Meetings for this point, the truth of the matter is they are just battling inertia (familiarity), and people just hate change when it comes to something they also dislike (Meetings) 😅

Dialpad Meetings doesn't have an API that we can connect into, so there's no current way to create custom integrations outside of what they list on their site (native integrations).

So say you want to create a meeting activity within your CRM (assuming you picked one of the Best CRM options on our list), you can't do that without a meeting recorder tool that can join your meeting, like Fireflies. So the only way to really do this is to hand off the integration side of things to a meeting recorder tool that has deep integrations with CRMs.

What I did back in the day to get this working actually, was relying on Fireflies to join the call and be the native integration with the CRM. They do have a dedicated landing page for their integration with Dialpad Meetings, although it is still has the URL "uberconference". 😅

There are positives and negatives that come with this approach though.

At the end of the day, we ultimately just decided to use Google Meet alongside Granola, as the native integration they have between eachother, alongside no longer having to fight the inertia (of people not wanting to try a "new" meeting tool), is where we ultimately found ourselves.

It's also more likely that tools will integrate natively with Google Meet and Zoom, especially because for some reason Dialpad Meetings is choosing to highly restrict their API for internal use only. 🤷