Most AI meeting recorders have a problem. There is a bot joining your call before your guest even arrives, a pause mid conversation to ask is it okay if I record this, or a notification to everyone that their words are being captured on video and audio. It is awkward, and it also means that most people just don't bother. So today Neo and I get into why the default way most tools handle meeting recording creates more friction than
it solves, and how Granola does things differently. We cover how it transcribes everything in the background without joining your meeting as a participant, how it combines your own notes with the transcript to surface what actually mattered, and the simple way we brief external meeting guests at Invandium so
there's no weirdness at all. And by the end of this show you will have a much better sense of why Granola has become the non negotiable meeting tool for both Neo and I and how to make it work in a way that feels natural for everyone in the room. And know this episode was not sponsored by Granola. It is just a tool that we genuinely love.
Welcome to how IAI with me doctor Amantha Imba, and Neo Applin, head of Inventium AI. Each episode we share one practical way to use AI better at.
Work and in life. No fluff, no dech jargon, just things you can use straight away. So, Neo, there are so many ways that we can use AI to record our meetings now, And interestingly enough, like I'm in so many meetings during the week, a lot of them, and meetings with clients or sales calls, and most of those meetings are not being recorded with AI. So I'm still finding that even though there's lots of ways that people
can record meetings using AI, it's generally not happening. Are you finding the same thing.
Yeah, I think a lot of people see the AI is oh yeah, we probably should have recorded that after the fact, right, It's not the default just yet. And in a lot of ways, I kind of like this because as you know, your teams meetings and Zoom meetings and things like that, you can say every time you
set the meeting, make sure you record it. Now, there are security privacy issues with that, like maybe this you don't want every meeting to be recorded, and so I get not having a default, but that's great, But it also means without having the default of recording, do people actually record it to people get the notes? And I think people are missing out on some really goodness, some great goodness are getting AI to be able to transcribe things for them.
So we're probably a little bit different at inventing them because we have very much doubled down on a tool for bringing AI into all our meetings, but doing so unobtrusively, because one of the things I hate about AI meeting recorders, particularly ones that are not in built to the platform that you're having meetings within, like whether that be Zoom or teams, you know, where it is fairly unobtrusive in that it's not a separate meeting participant, but you do
obviously have to pause the meeting and go, hey, do you mind if we record this, and then you know, find the record button and so on. And I find it very disconcerting when there's an AI meeting note taker arriving before the actual person arrives. That is a little bit of a pet peeve. But ad Inventium our number one, absolute favorite AI meeting note taker is Granola, So I have been a hardcore user of Granola for about a year now, and there's plenty of things I love about Granola.
So shall we go there into perhaps what Granola is because it's a little bit different to other AI meeting software out there?
All right, do you want to give it a granola introduction? I'm going to interview you about your granola use because you're much more hard care with granola than I am. I kind of flit around and try different tools. So what is it? First off? How does it work differently to Zoom and teams doing the recording?
So there's a few really key differences in terms of the interface. It's like I've got a normal blank notepad digital notepad in front of me, where I can still take notes as I normally would in a meeting, But what is going on in the background is that Granola is taking a transcript, a word for word transcript of the meeting, but it's not actually recording any audio or video, which means it's very unobtrusive, and it's kind of like there's just a really fast note taker listening to the
conversation and typing that all up. But what it's doing, because I'm also taking real notes in real time during the meeting, is it's noting what I'm doing, and it's thinking to itself, Ah, they must be the really important parts of the meeting, because Amantha is actually capturing those
is herself. And so then at the end of the meeting, when it augments my notes through its transcription, it will provide a really accurate and good summary, but it will build that summary based on what it knows I think was important about the meeting. And then it acts like other AI meeting software out there, where I can have a chat with the transcript, or I can ask for the action items, or I can prompt it to give me a follow up email that captures the key decisions
and actions and all those sorts of things. So that is essentially how Granola works.
So in summary, it's not integrated with Teams or Zoom. It's a separate application, right.
That's right. So it plugs into either the Google or the Microsoft ecosystem if you're not on I mean, I guess everyone's on one of those ecosystems, I think, or certainly the majority of listeners, So it plugs in. It plugs in, therefore to my calendar, assuming that your calendar is in the Google ecosystem or the Microsoft ecosystem, and it will automatically launch like when your meetings like, well, it will prompt you to launch. Sorry, it won't automatically launch.
It still manually you still have to click a button to accept that it is going to launch and transcribe this meeting.
But it gives you a notification saying, hey, you've got a meeting on now, do you want to open up teams and granola? That kind of thing.
That's exactly right, which I also do find quite useful because it will open up both applications at the same time, so just you know, a little bit less friction when you've got a meeting about to start.
But when you're in the team's meeting, you don't see it and no one sees it. It's just it's not like Granola's in the meeting. It's just part of your application background, not in teams or Zoom, which I really like about it as well.
Yes, and something so ad inventim. For our internal meetings, there is implicit but also explicit knowledge that if you are having an internal meeting with someone else at Bentium, at least one probably all meeting participants will have granola going on in the background, which which I love so pretty much every single meeting, including you know, from one on ones to team meeting is just captured within Granola, which is really awesome because you can do things within Granola, like,
you know, analyze all of my internal meetings and tell me what this says about you know, the team culture or how we make decisions, or you know, interesting prompts like that give you insight that you might not have otherwise had. But to me also, I think it's a
really healthy sign of psychological safety. Like a lot of people gasp at the idea of your one on ones being recorded, like you know, the manageres one on ones with all their direct reports, but an amantium that's just a given, And I just think that is such rich data where you know, I can look back on themes or areas for development that I've chatted about with the people that I manage, and you know, and it means that I can be a a more useful and insightful leader,
which I love. Now what I've started doing for external meetings is as a default jam My Ea, what she puts in the calendar invite is she just puts a little note saying that I use Granola to transcribe my meetings. We describe it as just having a really fast typist in the background, which is essentially what it is. I feel like psychologically that's a lot less you know, I don't know, scary or confronting than going Everything I say is being recorded and there is video and audio evidence.
So it literally is like I'm just typing really fast and capturing everything, which I feel is far less intimidating. But you know, I think, you know, it's also just nice to pop that in the meeting invite, as I'm now doing with all my meetings.
A couple of things I really like about granola is it's closer to being one note for those who know one note where you've got the folders and notes and things. It's closer to being than it is teams or zoom because you can create notes by creating just a granola. Whenever you want to create a granola, you can also
create a note around a meeting. And it actually because as a meantas said, it hooks in with your diary and so you can actually get the meeting title and all those kinds of things to put on your notes. It also has like a calendar type thing, so you can see what meetings that I have two days ago, to be able to find the notes from your meetings
a couple of days ago. There's even different spaces. They're kind of like folders in one note, because you might have a Granola you want to have for personal things separate to work things, and so you may want to keep your personal stuff separate from your work stuff. So the way that they've also structured on the inside is actually really quite clever, and I think it's a really
handy tool. So when you think of Granola, think of one note in that it starts off with you just typing stuff in, but it then fills in some gaps using AI because of the transcript. Is that a good way to describe it?
I like that for one note, users of which I am not.
Well if not think of it as notion. It's like notion, except for AIS listening to everything that's being said, and then it will fill in the gaps of your notes on notion.
Awesome. I love that now you're speaking my language. So that is Granola. This is not a sponsored episode or although if Granola wants to reach out to us and pay us money, we will happily accept. But always check with your IT department before installing software. That's right Neo, isn't it?
Yes?
Yes, But anyway, we love it at Inventium and highly recommend if you have permission to play with it, that you get into it. It's certainly saved me a lot of time and has given me so much data that has really helped improve my thinking and output.
Now, for those who may be a little bit geeky and want to go and do something that, or maybe you're a little bit budget constrained. If you can't or don't want to get Granola, check out hyper Note, Hyprnote, hypernote dot app. There is an open source equivalent of Granola, not as good as granola, but I got to say they're improving this at a rate of knots. You may need a beefy laptop, but you can use that on Mac and Windows as well, so don't feel like you're left out if you can't get Granola.
Amazing. Now, if you do track Granola, just send us a note let us know what you think. How you go, or if you have got favorite AI software that you think we should deep dive into in one of our how IAI episodes, Please drop us a note there are contact details in the show notes and we will see you next time. How i AI was hosted by me
Amantha Imber and Neo Applan. A big thank you to Martin Imber who does our sound editing, and Jim Rubio for production support, and thank you to John Kilby who composed the theme music.