Granola

Granola is an AI meeting notepad that records your computer’s system audio, transcribes your conversations, and generates structured notes when each call ends. It never joins your meeting as a visible bot. You stay in the conversation, write brief notes as you go, and Granola merges them with its transcript to produce a complete, actionable summary.

It runs on macOS, Windows, and iPhone, syncs with your calendar, and works across every major meeting platform including Zoom, Google Meet, and Microsoft Teams. For product teams, founders, and sales operators who run back-to-back calls all day, Granola removes the overhead of documentation so you can give each conversation your full attention.

How Granola works

Granola runs as a background app on your device. When a meeting starts, it captures the audio your computer is already processing. You take brief notes during the call, and the AI does the heavy lifting once it ends.

The core steps:

• Calendar sync: Granola connects to Google Calendar and surfaces your upcoming meetings so you can open the right notepad in one click before each call starts.
• Background audio capture: During the meeting, Granola records your computer’s system audio (the audio signal your device processes, not a separate microphone feed). No audio routes through an external bot or third-party server to join the call.
• Live notepad: You type whatever feels relevant during the meeting: names, decisions, open questions. You do not need to be thorough. The AI fills in the gaps.
• AI enhancement: When the call ends, an LLM (large language model) merges your sparse notes with the full transcript and produces a structured summary. The output follows whatever template you assigned to that meeting type, such as “User Interview,” “Sales Call,” or “1-on-1.”
• Cross-meeting chat: Granola’s Ask Granola feature lets you query your entire meeting history in natural language. Ask “what did we agree on for the Q3 launch?” and it returns a cited answer that links back to the source meeting.

What you can build with Granola

• Customer discovery database: Use Granola’s Notion integration to push structured interview notes into a research database after each user call. Product teams can track pain points and feature requests across dozens of sessions without any manual copy-paste, and query patterns across the full archive.
• Sales CRM auto-fill: Connect Granola to HubSpot so every call summary, objection log, and agreed next step flows into the CRM automatically after each sales call. Reps skip the manual data entry that typically eats 15 to 20 minutes after each conversation.
• Async team digest via Zapier: Trigger a Zapier workflow after each meeting to post a summary to a dedicated Slack channel. Distributed teams get async visibility into what was discussed and decided without needing to schedule follow-up syncs.
• Investor portfolio tracker: VCs and founders use Granola to maintain a searchable archive of all portfolio company calls. The cross-meeting chat turns months of conversations into a queryable knowledge base for tracking commitments, milestones, and decisions over time.
• Standardised interview panel notes: Assign a custom “Candidate Interview” template to hiring calls so every interviewer captures the same structured data. Share notes directly to an ATS (applicant tracking system) or Notion database with one click at the end of each session.