How to Use Granola AI for Meeting Notes

To use Granola for meeting notes, install the desktop app and connect your Google or Microsoft calendar.

Then open the meeting's note so transcription starts, type rough notes as you talk, and let Granola enhance them when the call ends.

Unlike meeting bots that join video calls as visible participants, Granola, an artificial intelligence (AI) notepad, captures computer audio and your microphone locally on your machine.

How to Use Granola: Your First Meeting, Step by Step

You start using Granola by installing the desktop client on macOS or Windows, signing in through Google or Microsoft, and clicking into a calendar meeting note to begin audio transcription.

Granola runs locally on your computer rather than sending a recording bot into your call. It listens to your system audio output and your microphone input simultaneously, transcribing dialogue in real time while you type notes in the main window.

Audio transcription never starts automatically in the background. Even if your meeting is on your connected calendar, Granola only begins transcribing when you actively open that meeting's note inside the app.

• Step 1: Download and install the desktop app for macOS 14 or later, or Windows. Plans, including the free Basic tier, are on Granola's pricing page.
• Step 2: Sign in with your Google or Microsoft account to link your calendar.
• Step 3: Grant microphone and system audio permissions when prompted by your operating system.
• Step 4: Click into your upcoming meeting note in the Granola sidebar before the discussion begins.
• Step 5: Type rough notes, key numbers, or action items into the notepad while listening to the conversation.
• Step 6: When the meeting ends, click to enhance the note and Granola builds a structured summary from your notes and the transcript.
• Step 7: Review the output, edit any details, and share the note to Slack or copy it as formatted markdown.

Writing Notes for Better AI Summaries

Your typed notes act as direct instructions that guide Granola when it parses the call transcript.

Granola summarizes meetings with its 'auto' template to begin with. When you type during the call, Granola treats your bullets as priorities and extracts supporting facts from the transcript to flesh them out.

For deeper background on how the app handles audio, read our Granola AI overview.

• Add client names and team jargon under Settings > Preferences > Language (Personal jargon) so the transcript spells them correctly.
• Jot down specific decisions or metric targets to ensure the AI highlights them in the final summary.
• Keep your notes concise because Granola uses the transcript to fill in the background context.

Customizing Notes with Granola Templates

Granola templates set the sections your enhanced notes are organized into.

To apply or create a template, type / in your meeting notes in the desktop app, then pick an existing template or build your own.

Documentation on when templates can be chosen contains a minor discrepancy between official pages. The Granola templates guide states that you can type / during a call to select a template, while the Granola feature requests page states that choosing a template before or during a meeting is not currently supported, defaulting instead to the auto template until enhancement.

Granola Chat and Reusable Recipes

Granola Chat allows you to query individual meetings, folders, attendee records, or your entire meeting history using the shortcut Cmd+J on Mac or Ctrl+J on Windows.

Inside the chat panel, you can ask direct questions about past conversations, such as pricing quotes mentioned last week or commitments made to a specific client. On the free Basic plan, chat uses Granola's standard Auto model. The Business plan ($14 per user per month as of October 2026 on Granola's pricing page) and Enterprise ($35 per user per month) let you pick a standard or thinking model yourself. Thinking models show how long they reasoned (Thought for Xs).

Recipes are reusable prompt templates accessed by typing / in the chat bar. Granola organizes these into three tabs: Discover, My recipes for your personal prompts, and Workspace recipes for shared team prompts. Desktop chat can also draft a Gmail message, a Slack update or a Google Calendar event, and nothing is sent until you confirm it in the chat panel.

Organization with Spaces and Shared Folders

Granola organizes meetings into private personal notes and collaborative team spaces with granular sharing controls.

Your My Notes space is private, even from workspace admins. Team spaces allow groups to organize shared calls into nested folders, making project discussions accessible across departments.

Notes support three distinct sharing levels: Private (accessible only to you), Only your company (visible to workspace colleagues), and Anyone with link (publicly accessible). When someone views a shared note on the web at notes.granola.ai, they see only the AI summary and your notes; full transcripts are withheld from public web links. If you need offline records, you can export your notes to comma-separated values (CSV) files from your profile settings.

Pre-Meeting Briefs and Follow-Up Emails

Pre-meeting briefs and automated follow-up email drafts are paid features available on Business and Enterprise plans with connected Google accounts.

Pre-meeting briefs arrive overnight before scheduled external meetings, usually two or three bullet points long. Granola compiles these briefs by searching past workspace notes, your calendar, and publicly accessible web sources including LinkedIn. This feature requires a connected Google Calendar and is supported on macOS, Windows, and iOS.

Follow-up emails are drafted after meetings with at least one external guest and no more than 10 people. They need a paid plan or active trial, Google sign-in and Gmail. Microsoft Outlook is not supported yet. You can undo a draft within about 10 seconds. For a detailed breakdown of tier limits, see our Granola AI pricing guide.

Granola on Mobile and Apple Watch

The Granola apps for iOS, Android and Apple Watch are free, so you can take notes on in-person conversations without a paid plan.

Granola for mobile is designed specifically for in-person discussions and cannot transcribe virtual meeting calls running on your phone. On iOS, you can place outbound phone calls through Granola to transcribe live conversations, though inbound calls cannot be captured. Mobile recordings cache audio temporarily during the discussion and delete it as soon as cloud transcription finishes.

The Apple Watch app needs watchOS 11 or later and the Granola iPhone app. It captures in-person conversations from your wrist. For complete setup instructions on your wearable device, review our guide on how to record meetings on Apple Watch. Note that Granola Chat on mobile is available only on iPhone, with no current support for Android or iPad.

Granola Keyboard Shortcuts Worth Learning

Keyboard shortcuts speed up navigation, settings access, and AI interactions inside the Granola desktop application.

Four shortcuts cover most of what you do during a call.

• Cmd+S (Mac) or Ctrl+S (Windows): Toggle the navigation sidebar to focus entirely on your notes.
• Cmd+J (Mac) or Ctrl+J (Windows): Open Granola Chat to query current or historical meeting details.
• Cmd+, (Mac) or Ctrl+, (Windows): Open the Settings menu to adjust audio inputs, integrations, and transcription vocabulary.
• Cmd+R (Mac) or Ctrl+R (Windows): Refresh the app view.

A Practical Week-One Workflow Routine

A week-one routine keeps your notes clean and makes sure no meeting goes untranscribed.

At Layer3Labs, we build AI workflow automation for small and mid-sized business (SMB) teams. Across those rollouts, note-taker adoption stalls when people treat the summary as a transcript dump instead of something their own notes steer.

Granola does not fit a team that wants a bot to join meetings with no one at the keyboard, because transcription starts only when someone opens the note. It syncs cloud Microsoft 365 (Exchange Online) and Google calendars, not on-premises Exchange, and Granola does not mention Linux support on any of its pages.

To get started right now, install the desktop app, connect your Google or Microsoft calendar, and conduct a brief two-minute test call to confirm your microphone and system audio permissions before your next team meeting.

• Monday morning: Connect your calendar, set your custom vocabulary under Settings Preferences, and verify your audio permissions.
• During every call: Open the scheduled note from your sidebar as soon as you join, and type key decisions or numbers as they happen.
• Post-call: Click Enhance immediately, verify the extracted action items, and file the note into the appropriate team space.
• Friday afternoon: Press Cmd+J or Ctrl+J to run a cross-meeting chat query summarizing your open deliverables for the week.