How to Use Granola AI: The Beginner's Guide (First Meeting, Enhanced Notes, and the Consent Rule)

CodexFuse Team · 2026-10-30T10:26:50.251Z · 10 min read min read

Granola AI takes meeting notes without sending a bot into your call. This beginner guide covers install, anchor notes, Enhanced notes, templates, pricing, and the consent rule.

Learning how to use Granola AI takes about fifteen minutes, and the whole method rests on one idea: you keep typing your own rough notes while the app listens on your own device, and when the meeting ends it turns those fragments into clean, structured notes. Granola AI is an AI meeting-note app built around a no-bot design — nothing joins your call, so no notetaker ever appears in the participant list. This granola ai tutorial walks you through installing it, connecting your calendar, taking anchor notes during your first meeting, enhancing them afterward, and the consent rule that keeps you out of trouble.

Granola works on any call that plays through your speakers — Zoom, Google Meet, Microsoft Teams, or a phone call on your desk. If you are still getting comfortable with video calls themselves, our Google Meet beginner guide covers joining, screen sharing, and settings before you add note-taking on top. Everything below follows the same order you will use in real life: install, open before the call, type lightly, enhance, then share.

What Is Granola AI, and Why Does It Use No Bot?

Granola AI is an AI notepad for back-to-back meetings that transcribes your calls from your own computer instead of joining them as a bot, then merges your typed fragments with the transcript into structured notes. The company behind it is a London startup founded in 2023 by Chris Pedregal and Sam Stephenson, and it grew fast on the no-bot idea — raising $125 million in March 2026 at a $1.5 billion valuation, according to the Max Productive review of the product.

The difference from other note takers is architectural, not cosmetic. Most meeting assistants join your call as a visible participant and record the cloud stream; Granola captures your microphone and your computer's system audio in the background while you type whatever you would normally type — half sentences, names, a number someone mentioned. When the meeting ends, it produces a polished summary, action items, and follow-up drafts, while your original notes stay visible on their own tab so you can always see what you wrote versus what the AI added.

How Do You Install Granola AI and Set Up Your First Meeting?

You install the Granola desktop app for macOS or Windows, sign in, and connect your calendar so upcoming meetings appear inside the app with an optional pre-meeting brief. The Mac app is the original and most mature; the Windows app went generally available in 2025, and iPhone, Android, and Apple Watch companions followed, expanding it beyond a Mac-only tool.

The one habit that decides everything is this: open Granola before the call starts. Granola connects to your calendar and can pull relevant context into a short brief before external meetings, and tapping a calendar event creates the note for that meeting — do that in advance to jot down pre-meeting thoughts, or at the moment the call begins so transcription starts immediately. It works with Zoom, Google Meet, Teams, and anything else that plays through your speakers, including calls on platforms that block bots entirely.

On mobile, install from the App Store or Google Play — note it is not available in the App Store in China, per Granola's own docs updated nine days before this article's publication. Phones cannot capture audio from other apps, so the mobile apps are designed for in-person meetings (and on iOS, outbound phone calls made through Granola's built-in dialer), not for transcribing virtual calls running on the same phone.

How Do You Take Good Anchor Notes While It Transcribes?

Good Granola notes are anchors, not minutes: during the call you type only the fragments worth remembering — a name, a number, a decision, a "follow up on pricing" — and let the transcript fill in the rest. Resist the urge to write full sentences; the less you type, the better the Enhanced notes read, because Granola weaves the transcript around your anchors instead of fighting your prose.

Two features make the anchors work harder. Speaker tagging attributes what was said to who, and multi-language support keeps transcription usable across mixed-language calls. If a call is loud or your speaker setup is weak, say less and anchor more — poor device audio is the main thing that weakens the transcript, and clean audio in means clean notes out.

What Are Enhanced Notes, and How Do You Clean Them Up?

Enhanced notes are the finished product: after the meeting ends, you click "Enhance notes" at the bottom of the note and Granola combines your typed fragments with the full transcript into a structured, editable version with summaries and action items. Your original words stay on their own tab, so you can always audit what the AI added against what you actually wrote.

Treat the enhanced version as a draft, not a record. Read it once, fix names and numbers, then use the voice-typing option to dictate corrections hands-free. Templates shape the output for different meeting types — a sales call and a 1:1 come out formatted differently — and they are available even on the free plan, so pick one before your first real meeting rather than after.

How Do Templates and Recipes Cut Repeat Work?

Templates and Recipes turn recurring meeting types into one-click formats: you set the structure once — agenda, decisions, action items, owners — and every future meeting of that type lands in the same shape. Shared folders and workspace-wide dictionaries extend this to teams, so client names, product terms, and acronyms are spelled the same way across everyone's notes.

The practical move is to build templates for the three meeting types you repeat most and leave the rest on the default. Recipes go one step further by bundling repeatable outputs — for example, turning every customer call into the same follow-up email skeleton — so the workflow survives even when the meeting itself is chaotic.

How Do You Share Notes, Chat Across Meetings, and Follow Up?

After a meeting you can share notes through shared folders, draft follow-up emails from the enhanced output, and ask questions across your whole meeting history with the AI chat — on the Basic plan that chat runs on the automatic model, while paid plans add model selection. Paid plans also unlock the advanced integrations with Slack, Notion, HubSpot, Attio, Affinity, and Zapier, plus MCP access so tools like Claude and ChatGPT can read your notes.

For follow-ups that need a human touch, send the summary where your contact actually replies. If that is a messaging app rather than email, our Telegram beginner guide covers setting up chats and groups for quick follow-up threads. Remember that sharing is workspace-scoped: check your workspace's sharing settings before forwarding notes outside your team.

Granola vs Otter: Which Note Taker Fits You?

Choose Granola if you want invisible capture with no participant-list footprint; choose Otter AI if you want live captions and a searchable audio archive you can replay later. That is the real trade: Granola optimizes for the meeting you are in right now — no bot, no announcement, notes built from your own typing — while Otter-style tools optimize for a complete, replayable record of everything said.

If your note-taking extends beyond meetings into a long-lived personal knowledge system, consider where each kind of note should live: meeting notes belong in Granola, and everything else — research, ideas, reference — belongs in a notes app built for the long term. Our Obsidian beginner guide covers building that second system so the two never blur together.

What Does Granola Cost, and Is the Free Plan Enough?

Granola's pricing page lists three per-user tiers: a free Basic plan, a Business plan, and an Enterprise plan. The free Basic plan includes AI meeting notes, bot-free capture, the desktop, iOS, Android and Apple Watch apps, speaker tagging, custom templates, multi-language support, and the option to opt out of model training — but meeting history is limited to 30 days, which is the line most users eventually hit.

Reviews that last verified pricing in September 2026 report Business at $14 per user per month, adding unlimited meeting history, advanced AI models, advanced integrations, centralized billing, MCP integration, and API access; Enterprise adds workspace-wide admin policies, SSO, SCIM provisioning, audit API, and HIPAA-compliant workspaces. Pricing changes often, so confirm the current figures on granola.ai/pricing before buying — the free plan is genuinely usable as a trial, but anyone with more than a month of meetings to search will need Business.

What Is the Consent Rule, and How Do You Stay Safe?

The consent rule is simple: Granola does not announce itself, so you must tell the people on the call that you are using an AI assistant to take notes. The product's silence is its selling point — no bot appears in the participant list — which is exactly why disclosure is your responsibility; there is no built-in prompt forcing you to do it, and Granola's own pricing page carries a "Let people know you're using Granola" setting that is per-user on standard plans and admin-enforceable on Enterprise.

On the privacy side, the facts Granola states publicly are strong: audio is deleted after transcription, transcript retention is configurable with auto-deletion, the company is SOC 2 Type II certified, and third-party AI providers are barred from training on your data. One caveat from independent reviews: the model-training opt-out is a setting, not the default, outside Enterprise — so turn it on yourself during setup, and check your local recording-consent laws before your first meeting.

How Does Granola Work on iPhone?

On iPhone, Granola is built for in-person meetings: open the app, tap a calendar event or an ad-hoc note, and it captures the conversation around you with speaker identification. The iOS app adds three phone-specific features — notes during outbound phone calls made through its dialer, Granola Chat for questioning your notes (iPhone only, not iPad or Android), and meeting notes started from your wrist on an Apple Watch running watchOS 11 or later.

Android covers in-person meetings with the same calendar and note flow, minus the iPhone-only Chat and phone-call features. Both mobile apps sync with the desktop so notes follow you, and neither supports multiple accounts signed in at the same time — you must sign out of one before signing into another on the same device.

What Can Go Wrong on Day One?

The classic failure is forgetting to open the desktop app before the call — there is no bot to fall back on, so a closed app means no transcription at all. Weak speaker audio produces weak transcripts, so use a decent headset or speaker setup rather than laptop speakers in a noisy room. Finally, remember the free plan's 30-day history limit: notes older than that disappear from search on Basic, so export or upgrade before your first month of history ages out.

Sources

• Max Productive — Granola AI Review 2026: Features, Pricing & Alternatives — features and pricing last verified September 2026; fetched 2026-10-30
• Granola — Pricing plans — plan features, fetched 2026-10-30
• Granola Docs — Getting started with Granola for mobile — updated 9 days before publication; fetched 2026-10-30
• Marketer Seul Ki — Granola AI Review: The No-Bot Meeting Notetaker — pricing as of August 2026; fetched 2026-10-30
• Zapier — What is Granola? The AI note taker everyone's talking about — fetched 2026-10-30
• Layer3Labs — What Is Granola AI? — updated 23 days before publication; fetched 2026-10-30

Frequently Asked Questions

Is Granola AI free?

Yes — Granola's Basic plan is free and includes AI meeting notes, bot-free capture, the desktop and mobile apps, speaker tagging, custom templates, and multi-language support. The main limit is meeting history: only the last 30 days are searchable on the free plan, and unlimited history requires the paid Business plan.

Does Granola AI join my meeting as a bot?

No. Granola captures audio from your own device — your microphone and system audio — so nothing appears in the call's participant list. That is why it works on platforms that block bots, and also why you must tell participants yourself that you are recording.

Does Granola AI work on Windows?

Yes. The Windows desktop app is generally available; macOS remains the original and most mature app, and iPhone, Android, and Apple Watch companions are also available. On mobile the apps capture in-person meetings rather than virtual calls running on the same phone.

What happens to my audio recordings?

Granola deletes the audio after transcription — its stated default — and lets you configure transcript retention with auto-deletion. There is no audio playback feature, which is the trade-off for the no-bot model; if you need replayable audio for compliance, a bot-based tool like Otter or Fathom fits better.

Granola vs Otter AI: which is better for beginners?

Granola is simpler for a beginner who attends a lot of meetings and wants clean notes with minimal setup — open the app, type anchors, enhance. Otter is better if you need live captions or a full searchable audio archive. Both have free tiers, so trying Granola's free plan for a week of real meetings is the cheapest way to decide.