Granola debuts AI notebook for meetings

Taking meeting notes is tedious work, so why not leave this task to artificial intelligence? That’s the premise of new startup Granola, whose AI-powered notebook app lets you combine your own notes with notes created by AI based on meeting transcripts. Unlike other AI transcription apps that attempt to summarize key meeting points on their own, Granola uses a more collaborative approach to working with AI. You can choose to guide the AI ​​by writing down what you think are the most important takeaways from the meeting and letting the AI ​​fill in the details.

Co-founder Chris Pedregal says he was inspired to build Granola after working with GPT-3 when it was new. He experimented with different prototypes to find out how artificial intelligence could be useful in his daily life. The usefulness of AI led him to create his previous company, Socratic, an AI teaching app that allowed people to take a photo of a homework problem and teach the user how to solve it. The company was sold to Google, and Pedregal stayed with the tech giant for several years before he wanted to build a company again.

Building various tools, including at one point an AI-powered accounting application, led to realization.

“Through this process, I became convinced that LLM (Large Language Models) would change the tools we use at work. This is especially effective when it comes to taking spoken language and making it usable,” Pedregal said.

He later teamed up with co-founder Sam Stephenson, who previously worked at note-taking app Ideaflow. They initially met in a meetup group focused on meeting tools. Like Pedregal, Stephenson also lived in London, so they met in real life and discovered they got along well. “We’re basically married now,” Stephenson joked.

The two founded Granola in March 2023 to make meeting notes easier to manage.

“People are spending a crazy amount of time in meetings, especially since the pandemic — especially Zoom meetings,” Pedregal said. Many people attend meetings all day long without having time to review, write, or organize previous notes. Additionally, for most people, meetings are the only time they take notes; they rarely take notes at other times in their lives.”

Granola is working to solve the note-taking problem with an app that is essentially an AI-powered evolution of something like Apple Notes. You interact with Granola on your computer and can write your own notes or bullet points, or leave everything to the AI. The app connects to your calendar and then directly transcribes audio from your Mac. This means no conference bots join your online meetings like with other solutions. Currently, Granola works with Zoom, Google Meet, Teams, Slack and WebEx.

The app essentially works like a regular notepad, which means you can type your own notes during the meeting. However, Granola analyzes who is attending the meeting, what roles they play, and what the meeting is about – for example, a sales call, a job interview, or an investor pitch. Once the meeting is over, Granola updates your notes with more information, referencing the transcripts as they become more specific. If you make a typo or forget to capitalize, Granola can handle it while tidying up, too.

For example, if during a meeting someone says that the project budget is PLN 10,000. dollars, you can simply type “10 thousand dollars” in his notes. When Granola returns, he will expand it with more information, such as “Photography budget can increase to 10,000.”

Granola’s notes are hyperlinked to a transcript summary, so you can check them for accuracy or simply refer to the entire statement. AI notes are also written in gray to distinguish them from your own notes, in black.

The app uses OpenAI’s GPT-4o, which means you can interact with it just like you would with ChatGPT.

Pedregal believes Granola is an improvement over other meeting transcription tools because it doesn’t just summarize the meeting with AI: it allows you to write your own notes and even collaborate with the AI. You can use Markdown formatting to guide the AI ​​by typing in headlines preceded by a pound sign, for example, and the AI ​​will know to add bullet points related to that topic below.

“We currently outsource a lot of our activities to LLM companies such as ChatGPt. And we have very little control over it,” Pedregal said. “You ask ChatGPT to write an email for you, it will write it and it will be magical. But if you get him to write an email that you actually send… it’s very difficult. It’s almost more trouble than it’s worth. I think that’s the big question right now: how to design AI to still be in control. Are you still guided by judgment, but it helps you do your best work?”

Fueling Granola’s launch is a $4.25 million funding round closed last year and led by Lightspeed. Other investors include Betaworks, Firstminut Capital, else, Uncommon and similar angels Mike Krieger, SoleiaHunter’s Walk, David LiebMike Hudack, Gabor Cselle and Andrew Parker.

Pedregal says that in the long run, the team would like to move beyond meetings and tackle all the next steps, such as writing a memo, filing a bug report, planning next steps, and more.

Granola is free for the first 25 meetings and then costs a reasonable $10 per month. Over time, the startup aims to generate additional revenue by launching a team or company plan where pricing can be adjusted. The application can be downloaded for free on macOS.

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