Granola — The Complete Guide
Granola takes notes during meetings by combining your own rough typing with the audio, producing notes that reflect what mattered to you rather than a full transcript.
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Granola takes notes during meetings by combining your own rough typing with the audio, producing notes that reflect what mattered to you rather than a full transcript.
Most meeting tools send a bot into the call and produce a transcript and summary. Granola does neither.
It captures audio locally and lets you type rough notes as you normally would. Afterwards it merges the two — your fragments become full notes, informed by what was actually said.
A transcript summary reflects what was said. Your notes reflect what you thought was important. The second is usually more useful and the first is usually longer.
Because you are still taking notes, you stay engaged in the meeting rather than outsourcing attention to a tool.
Nothing visible joins the meeting. For client calls, interviews and sensitive discussions, that avoids the awkwardness of an obvious recording bot.
Consent obligations still apply. Not appearing in the participant list does not remove the need to tell people you are recording where that is required.
The value shows most on consecutive meetings, where notes from the third call blur into the fourth.
Ask it questions across meetings afterward — what did we agree with that client, what did this person say about timelines — and it answers from your accumulated notes.
Templates shape the output by meeting type: discovery calls, one-to-ones, interviews, standups. Each produces a different structure from the same raw input.
Setting up two or three templates for your recurring meeting types is the highest-return configuration step.
Mac and iOS only at time of writing, which rules it out for Windows-based teams.
It also depends on you typing something. In a meeting where you take no notes at all, the output is weaker than a pure transcription tool would produce.
Those tools transcribe comprehensively and integrate deeply with CRMs — better where the goal is a complete record or automated CRM logging.
Granola is better where the goal is your own usable notes. Different problems, frequently confused.
Audio is processed to generate notes, so understand where that processing happens and what is retained before using it on confidential calls.
For regulated environments, check the vendor's data handling against your requirements rather than assuming local capture means local processing.
A meeting recorder creates a permanent, searchable record of conversations people believed were ephemeral, and the governance questions arrive after adoption rather than before.
Consent is not a settings toggle. Recording rules vary by jurisdiction and several require all parties to agree, not just the host. For external meetings, say it out loud at the start rather than relying on a notification banner people do not read.
Decide retention deliberately. Indefinite is a decision, and usually the wrong one: a two-year archive of internal conversation is a disclosure liability in any dispute. Set a period and enforce it.
Work out who can search it. A tool where any colleague can retrieve any meeting is a different organisation from one where access follows the participants. This is the question that causes trouble later and is easiest to set at the start.
Exclude the meetings that should not be recorded — performance conversations, grievances, anything legally privileged — and make that a default rather than a reminder.
And treat the summary as a draft. A generated action item attributed to the wrong person, circulated automatically, is a small and recurring source of avoidable friction.
Most tool decisions are made on capability and lost on adoption. The pattern is consistent enough to plan around.
Name an owner. Not a committee and not "the team" — one person responsible for the configuration, the questions, and whether it is still earning its licence in six months. Tools without an owner decay into a subscription nobody cancels.
Start with one workflow, not the whole team. A narrow deployment that works spreads on its own; a broad one that half-works produces a reputation the tool never recovers from.
Write down what it is not for. The boundary matters more than the capability, because the damage comes from use outside the intended case — and nobody is told where that edge is unless someone writes it down.
Keep the manual path working. For at least one cycle. A team that cannot fall back is a team that cannot report a problem honestly.
Review it on a date you set in advance. Three months, against the criteria you wrote at the start. A tool nobody has reviewed is a tool nobody has decided to keep — and the review is the only thing that ever removes one.
Opens your assistant with this page as the source, and a question rather than a summary. It will ask what you are building before it answers.
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