After a long time searching for a fantastic AI tool to capture the details of my frequent weekly meetings, I finally found one: Granola AI.
Why Granola Is the Perfect AI-Powered Meeting Assistant
Granola AI packs in some really useful features. Not all are AI-powered; they’re just really useful.
Automatically Detects Meetings and Calendar Events
Once installed on your device (Windows, macOS, or iOS—I’m waiting for an Android version), Granola can automatically spring into life whenever you have a scheduled meeting, or as soon as you start a video or voice chat. You can allow Granola access to your Google Workspace, where it automatically syncs anything that’s upcoming.
At the time of writing, Granola is primarily focused on Google Workspace and Calendar. However, there is a Granola waiting list for those using Outlook. Furthermore, if you don’t have a Google Workspace account, you can use Granola’s personal Gmail workaround to create an account.
However, you can also disable call detection if you prefer to start Granola manually.
AI Note Summaries Are Almost Unbeatable
If the idea of automatic meeting detection didn’t wow you, Granola’s AI note-taking and summaries probably will. At least, they did for me. That’s because you can use Granola to work with your AI-generated notes and meeting recordings in numerous different ways. Better still, Granola uses GPT-5 to power its note summaries and queries, which means it uses OpenAI’s latest model.
There have been some grumblings and rumblings about the capabilities of GPT-5, but overall, it’s a powerful AI model baked directly into this note-taking tool. But if that doesn’t suit you and you prefer to use a different AI model, Granola also has you covered. You can switch between general-purpose AI models and reasoning models (also known as “thinking models”), which are better suited to deep, complex tasks.
In all, at the current time, you can use GPT-5, GPT-4.1, and Claude 3.7, or switch to reasoning models such as Claude 4 Sonnet, Gemini 2.5 Pro, GPT-5 Thinking, and OpenAI o3. It’s quite comprehensive.
What I like is that Granola gives you a few handy preset options to switch up the notes, along with the option to Chat with meeting. It starts with a basic set of notes from your meeting, typically arranged with a set of bullet points. But you can opt to make them more detailed or more concise, or probe specific parts of the transcript. Hovering over a specific bullet point reveals a small “plus symbol” you can select, which reveals where the note came from in the transcript. It gives you a quick insight into the point and the specific reason it was noted.
Chat with meeting is where Granola’s AI meeting mode comes alive. When you have a long, detailed transcription, and the overview points aren’t enough, you can delve into and prompt Granola AI for more information.
For example, in a chat I had with Opera regarding its upcoming Neon AI browser, I couldn’t quite remember some of the details, but they weren’t in the notes. But a quick prompt easily found what I needed to know. And from there, I can also ask for any insight into the conversation I may have missed, other considerations, and so on.
If You’re Unsure, Ask Granola
You don’t have to work on a single conversation or transcript basis, either. In the bottom right of the screen is the Ask Granola button, which serves as an AI overview of every transcript and set of notes I’ve added to the tool. The Ask Granola option is great for finding information, especially if you have a series of daily or weekly meetings with similar themes.
The preset prompts give you a good indicator of where to start with Ask Granola, suggesting questions such as “Who have I promised to follow up with” and “Catch me up on what’s important.” But this is an AI tool, and these are general prompts. You can get super-specific if you want and add multiple layers of complexity to suit your transcripts and notes.
Ask Granola is like having a personal assistant work back through your meetings to find those snippets of information that really make a difference. Given how much customization is available to you through the power of AI prompting, you’re really only limited by those prompts.
Add Notes for Granola to Work With
One feature I’ve not played around with as much as I’d like is the option to add notes to a conversation/transcript that’s taking place, and have Granola build out specific information around it. For example, say you’re jumping on your weekly team meeting, where each week, you talk about a specific set of data.
Before the meeting, you can create a set of notes and point Granola at them. The tool will then build information around the notes you’ve added, bringing in more information as required, working with the transcript as it takes place.
This is particularly handy if there are certain areas you really want more information on, be that to think about later or follow up on immediately.
Share Your Notes When They’re Ready
The first time I saw Granola in use was at a busy smartphone launch (for the Nothing Phone 3 in London). My colleague was preparing to take notes on the keynote speech, and I saw him open this app, then hit listen. The transcript starts appearing near instantly.
But what was really fantastic was at the end of the keynote, when he turned and said, “Check this out.” After Granola compiled its notes, he shared the entire chat with me, AI capabilities and all. In that, you can share your entire set of notes with anyone with the link, and they can then use Granola’s integrated AI models to search what was said, find insights, and so on.
It’s a great option when it comes to working in teams, or as in my example, when you want to share your notes with someone else. You can go as far as to make shared Granola folders within your workspace, giving everyone access at the same time (or limiting it to specific email addresses).
How Does Granola AI Handle Privacy?
Granola AI isn’t processing your requests locally, so it does come with the caveat that you should avoid feeding it anything particularly sensitive.
Granola’s Privacy Policy explains that it doesn’t “allow third parties such as OpenAI or Anthropic to use your Personal Data to train AI models,” and that it only uses “De-Identified Data to train AI models.” There is also the option to switch off the use of anonymized data sharing, which, if you value your privacy, I’d suggest doing. I’d prefer this to be opt-in rather than opt-out, but at least the option is there.
I’m not knocking Granola on this front; it’s a great app, hence why I’ve written about it. But if you’re engaged with confidential data, health information, passwords, intellectual property, and so on, it’s best to avoid sharing any of this with an AI tool, Granola or otherwise. It’s worth noting that Granola is SOC 2 compliant, mind.
Positively, Granola AI doesn’t store the audio from the transcript. Once that conversation is transcribed and ready for analysis and note-taking, the audio is discarded. Furthermore, any data collected is encrypted in transit and at rest, which is another big positive.
And I know that the company is literally called “Granola AI,” but I appreciate how up front Granola is that everything is powered by AI. Some tools make reference to using AI but attempt to hide “how the magic works” by distorting where and when they use large language models (LLMs). But Granola keeps it central and clear.
Granola AI Is Premium, but Worth the Cost of Entry
Your first 25 meetings with Granola are free, as part of a trial. Once that completes, Granola costs $18 per month, but drastically expands the number of apps you can integrate with (up to 8,000 via Zapier). It’s a steep jump, and one that many individuals may find hard to stomach.
However, given the time it can save, its depth of features, and up-to-date AI models, Granola is worth the investment.