Granola

Granola got the one thing right that the whole meeting-AI category missed: people want AI to capture the meeting — without taking the notes away from them. The moment recording starts you get a panel for your own notes, and the AI's summary merges into what you wrote instead of replacing it. Your notes are your thinking; that can't be outsourced. Most tools chase the verbatim transcript and leave no room for yours — which is why, in an era when every product can already record, I kept watching AI practitioners install this one separate app.

Notes are thinking. Thinking shouldn't be outsourced.

In practice it absorbs all the mess of real meetings. The official scenario: one phone running Granola in the middle of the table, everyone else keeps their favorite notes tool. Half the room online and half off, recording locked behind yet another meeting-tool subscription, interfaces nobody can learn while a meeting scrambles to start — all quietly handled. And the output ships as-is: its recognition of key terms and product names is far ahead of other AI tools, and once the summary merges with my notes I hand it straight over, no post-meeting cleanup. Anything I still want to know, I ask it.

This team reads scenes unusually well. Sharing is built to be almost inevitable — the summary gets nudged toward colleagues who all genuinely need it, so the product spreads through the meetings themselves. Last year's annual wrap turned everyone's meeting verbal tics into a genuinely funny memory. Rare focus on one narrow vertical, and the whole product reduces to one clean formula: human thinking in, AI amplifies, better human thinking out.