How to Use Granola: Your Rough Notes, Filled In

To use Granola, install the desktop app, connect your calendar, and open a note before your meeting starts. Granola transcribes using your computer’s system audio rather than joining the call as a bot, per its own documentation (checked 2026-08-04). You type rough notes during the meeting the way you always have, and afterward Granola merges what you wrote with what it heard. That merge is the whole product. It is why the answer to “what is this adding over my existing notepad” is not “nothing,” and it is also why sloppy input produces a disappointing result.

What Granola does differently from a bot notetaker

Most tools in this category send a visible bot into your call, capture everything, and hand you a summary generated entirely from the transcript. Your own notes play no part. That is how Otter, Fireflies, and similar tools work.

Granola inverts the relationship. You keep taking notes, badly and in fragments, and the AI fills in around them using the transcript. Per Granola’s own guidance, your typed notes appear in one color and the AI-generated additions in another, so you can always see which is which.

The consequence is the thing worth understanding before you start: what you type steers what you get. Type nothing and you get a generic summary of a meeting, the same as any other tool would produce. Type “pricing concerns” and Granola has a pointer to the part of the conversation you actually cared about. Your notes are not competing with the AI. They are the instructions.

There is a second difference, and it is structural. Because Granola captures system audio rather than joining as a participant, nobody in the meeting sees a bot in the attendee list. That has real implications in both directions, and our guide to bot in the call versus bot-free capture covers them honestly, including the part where invisible capture is a privacy question rather than a privacy feature.

Step 1: Install, sign in, and connect a calendar

Granola runs as a desktop app on Mac and Windows, with mobile apps on iOS and Android. Install it, sign in, and connect your Google or Microsoft calendar.

Granola’s own best-practice guidance suggests filling out your profile with your role, because context about what you do informs how it summarizes. It also suggests maximizing your microphone input volume, which is worth doing once and forgetting about. Weak input audio is the most common cause of a poor transcript, and no amount of AI compensates for a conversation it could barely hear.

Step 2: Open the note before the meeting starts

This is the step that loses people their first meeting, so it is worth stating plainly.

Per Granola’s own guidance, you need to manually open the note to start transcription, and clicking away stops it. This is not a tool that silently records everything in the background while you work in another window. If you open the note, then switch to your browser to pull up a document, you may return to find you captured far less than you expected.

Build the habit: open the note first, leave it open, and use a second window or a second screen for anything else. Granola syncs your calendar and shows upcoming meetings, so the note is one click away rather than something to hunt for.

Step 3: What to type while the meeting runs

Type less than you think, and type the right things.

Granola’s guidance points at decisions, action items, and standout quotes, in simple bullet points. That is the correct instinct, and the reason is mechanical rather than stylistic. A bullet that says “Priya pushed back on the timeline” gives the AI an anchor: a name, a topic, and a signal that this part mattered. A bullet that says “timeline” gives it much less. Focused notes produce focused output; vague notes produce vague output.

Three things worth capturing as they happen:

• Decisions, in the moment they are made, because these are what summaries most often miss.
• Anything with a name attached to it, since who owns a task is the detail that gets lost.
• Your own reactions, which the transcript cannot contain because you did not say them out loud.

That last one is genuinely useful. A note that a client sounded unconvinced is not recoverable from a transcript. It exists only in your head, and typing it takes two seconds.

Step 4: Enhancing the notes afterward

When the meeting ends, Granola merges your typed notes with what it heard from the transcript. Per its own guidance, you can edit freely afterward, and re-enhance if the result is not what you wanted.

Read the enhanced version once before you file it. Granola’s guidance suggests verifying key takeaways by clicking through to locate the source in the transcript, which is worth doing for anything you intend to act on or forward. An AI-written line that attributes a commitment to the wrong person is the kind of error that is invisible until it causes a problem.

If the output is generic, the usual cause is upstream: too little typed during the meeting. Re-enhancing the same sparse notes will not fix it. Better notes next time will.

Step 5: Templates, and when they help

Granola offers templates that add structure to notes, and per its guidance they apply after enhancement and can be applied retroactively.

Templates earn their keep when the same meeting type repeats. A weekly one-to-one, a discovery call, a sprint review: each has a shape you want every time, and a template enforces it so you are not rebuilding the structure from memory. For a one-off conversation, a template is overhead. Reach for them once a meeting type becomes a habit, not before.

What Granola cannot do

Two limits matter, and both are documented rather than speculative.

On mobile, it cannot transcribe virtual calls from other apps. Per Granola’s own documentation, phones do not let apps capture audio from other apps, so the mobile app is aimed at in-person meetings and, on iOS, calls made through Granola’s own dialer. If you were expecting to record a Zoom call from your phone, that is not what the mobile app does.

It cannot capture what your computer cannot hear. System audio capture works well for a call coming through your machine and for a room you are sitting in with a decent microphone. It degrades in the same conditions everything else degrades in: distance, cross-talk, background noise. Our guide on why your AI meeting transcript is inaccurate covers the fixes, and Granola’s own advice to use a headset in noisy environments points the same direction.

For in-person meetings specifically, device-audio capture is the right mechanism, and capturing AI notes for in-person meetings covers microphone placement and consent in the room. If you are still choosing a tool, start with the hub guide on how to choose an AI meeting note taker.

Features and platform behavior in this category change often. Confirm current details on Granola’s own site before relying on any specific one.

FAQ

Does Granola join my meeting as a bot?
No. Per Granola’s documentation (checked 2026-08-04), it transcribes using your computer’s system audio rather than joining the call as a participant, so nothing appears in the attendee list.

Why did Granola stop transcribing partway through my meeting?
Per Granola’s own guidance, you have to manually open the note to start transcription, and clicking away stops it. Keep the note open for the whole meeting and use another window or screen for anything else.

Do I still need to take notes myself?
Yes, and that is the design. Granola merges your typed notes with the transcript, so what you write steers what it produces. Typing nothing yields a generic summary.

Can Granola record a Zoom call on my phone?
No. Granola’s documentation states that phones do not let apps capture audio from other apps, so the mobile app cannot transcribe virtual calls from other applications. It is aimed at in-person meetings.

Can I change how the notes are structured after the fact?
Yes. Templates apply after enhancement and can be applied retroactively, and you can edit the enhanced notes freely or re-enhance them.