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TABLE OF CONTENTS
Overview
Granola is an AI-powered tool designed to simplify and enhance digital note-taking, meeting transcription, and summarisation workflows. As a long-time user of the desktop app, and an early beta tester of their iOS app that was publicly released today, I've had the opportunity to evaluate the platform's evolution over several months. With today marking the public release of their iOS app, it's a great moment to share a detailed review of the full Granola.ai experience.
macOS app
macOS App
- System-Level Audio Capture: Granola’s macOS app captures system audio directly, eliminating the need for meeting bots. This means it works automatically with Zoom, Microsoft Teams, Google Meet, Slack, FaceTime, WhatsApp, and more—anything that plays audio through your speakers.
- Automatic Meeting Detection: The app can detect when a call begins and will prompt you to start transcription and summarisation, which reduces friction and ensures you never miss important content.
- Live Transcription & Note-Taking: You can view transcriptions in real-time, take notes during the call, and post-meeting, Granola enhances those notes with AI-generated summaries, key decisions, and action items.
- Customisable Templates: Choose from a library of summary templates tailored to different meeting types—or build your own to suit your workflow.
- Privacy: Granola doesn’t record or store audio or video, only transcripts. One thing to note on privacy is that, since it doesn’t have a bot joining your calls, the people you’re meeting with don’t know that you’re transcribing unless you inform them. I’m much less concerned about this than I would have been even a year or two ago, though, since AI note-takers have become a pretty widely accepted norm in business.
iOS App
- Designed for In-Person Meetings: The iOS app excels at capturing live conversations using the device microphone, with clear speaker detection and high transcription accuracy. It can’t access audio from meeting apps like Google Meet, because of Apple’s tight sandboxing restrictions on iOS, but I rarely take those types of calls from my phone anyway,
- Intuitive Interface: The app offers a sleek, native iOS experience with responsive controls and lockscreen access, via Live Activities, to start or end a meeting transcription.
- Auto-Upload & Cross-Device Sync: Recordings on mobile are uploaded and enhanced almost instantly, letting you access the final transcript and summary on your Mac or browser with no manual steps.
- Battery & Performance: The first few times I used it, I definitely had battery anxiety about transcribing and summarising long meetings, but it’s surprisingly battery-efficient. Battery drain is minimal.
- User Interface: Clean, intuitive, and responsive. The design choices feel native to iOS and well thought out.
Strengths
- Accurate transcription across environments
- High-quality, customisable summaries
- Frictionless experience thanks to system-level audio
- Smart detection of meeting starts
- Cross-platform sync between macOS and iOS
Areas for Improvement
- No public API or Zapier integration (it’s in the works) - but there are integrations to send a note directly to Notion, Hubspot, or Slack
- Slight lag when handling very long (1hr+) recordings on mobile (I always get anxious that it’s going to crash before finishing the summary)
Final Thoughts
Granola stands out as a thoughtfully crafted tool that genuinely improves the way teams and individuals manage meeting content. The iOS app launch adds an important dimension to its utility, making it a viable daily driver for remote workers, consultants, and busy professionals alike. I’ll continue testing as the team rolls out integrations and new features, but even in its current form, Granola is one of the most polished AI productivity tools I’ve used in recent months.
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