Granola AI Notepad Makes Meeting Notes Effortless (Full Transcript)

[00:00:00] Speaker 1: So many of us are working with remote teams, international clients, and everything in between. So effective online meetings are more important than ever. To get the most out of our meetings and to truly follow up on what you've discussed, we need a powerful but easy way to organize notes. I'm Nick, and today we're partnering with Granola to show how you can use their AI-powered notepad to transcribe any meeting, generate organized notes, and get detailed analysis of your meetings. Granola doesn't care which meeting app you're using because it simply transcribes the audio on your computer during a call, which is great for me because I don't always get to decide which meeting platform I'm using. I usually just accept invitations and go with whatever the client wants. And this is a great time for a Microsoft Teams user like me to be working with Granola because they now support sign-in and linking with a Microsoft 365 account. So I can use my Teams or Outlook calendar as my primary system and still use Granola whenever I have a meeting in Zoom or any other system. You can go to granola.ai to download and install the app. The first thing you do when you run Granola is sign in using your Google Workspace account or your Microsoft 365 account. If you have both, you should sign in with the account that you use most often. I set up Granola with my Microsoft account. Granola connects to your calendar and always shows the meetings you have coming up over the next three days. And every item on the list represents a Granola note. Of course, there are notes from meetings I've had in the past, but even the upcoming events listed here are note pages, just waiting to be activated. Sometimes I like to click an upcoming meeting from my calendar to open the note, then start writing some thoughts or agenda items well before it's time for that meeting. This helps me do some prep work and reminds me of topics I need to bring up during the meeting. Back on that main page, you can even click the quick note button to make a new note and start taking notes manually. So you can make and store notes that have nothing to do with an individual meeting. But usually what I do is just close the Granola window. When you do that, it still runs in the background. On a Mac, you can see Granola running in the menu bar and on a Windows computer, you can find it in the system tray. You could quit the application there, but I wanna keep it running while I'm working on other things. Because it's linked to your main calendar, a notification pops up from Granola one minute before each meeting, even if you don't have Teams or Outlook open. When you're ready, you can click that to join the meeting and the Granola window opens up, but is already resized down to a small panel. So let's see what happens when you're in an actual meeting. Hey there. Hello, Garrick. Is it okay if I use Granola to transcribe the meeting? I wanna make sure I have good notes. Yeah, that's fine with me. Can you send me those notes later? Oh yeah, no problem at all. I like to leave the Granola window open in case I want to interact with it during the meeting. But even if you close the window, it will continue to transcribe the meeting. There's a button you can click to show or hide the transcript in real time. So if you miss something important, you can take a quick look at the transcript, or even better, you can ask the AI chat for a summary or ask about something you missed. Or instead of asking a question, you could use one of Granola's built-in recipes. Recipes are quick commands for the AI to analyze what's been said or give you some help during a meeting. In the chat field, type the forward slash key, choose a recipe from the list, or if you know the name of the recipe, just start typing the name. I like the recipes Suggest Topics and Suggest Questions. When I want to contribute more in a meeting, these give me some talking points I can use based on what's been discussed. The main part of this window, of course, is where you can write your own notes. I already have some notes here that I wrote when I was preparing for the meeting, but I can keep adding more notes whenever there's something important I need to follow up on. When the meeting is finished, there's a button to stop the transcription, and the AI completely organizes the notes. Now, clearly, this is based on the transcript, but it also integrates any notes you wrote yourself before or during your meeting. Your manual notes appear in slightly darker text. At any point, you can resize the window to get more working space. At the top, there's a toggle switch where you can edit your manual notes, or you can switch to the AI-enhanced notes. And the optional templates can reformat the notes based on the type of meeting. The notes you need from a hiring meeting are different from a weekly team meeting. Choose a template and let the AI reformat the notes with the section headers that better match that type of meeting. If you point at a line in the notes, there's a button you can click to see the section from the transcript where it found this information. Or you can open the actual transcript if you need to see the original source. And that AI chat field that helped me during the meeting is even more helpful after a meeting. You might ask a direct question like, is there anything that's falling behind schedule? Or use a recipe to get actionable insights that much faster. I like to get my list of to-dos or action items after a meeting. And in any response in the AI chat, there is a copy button, so you can copy the response and paste it somewhere. The back button on the left takes you back to the full Granola interface. All of your notes are listed here, so you can get back to them later. Before the meeting happened, this note was in the coming up section, but now it's in the list of notes from previous meetings. In fact, my teammate did ask me to share the notes from that meeting. So I can open that note again and click the share button. You can put in somebody's email address, then share the note in an email. Or you could copy a link to the note and send that link. The link will work for anybody unless you change the sharing options. So if you need to lock this down for privacy, make sure you set that before you copy and paste the link. Back on the main page again, you might want to get your notes a little more organized. There are a few folders listed on the left by default, but you can also make new folders. Your new folders will be added to the list on the left. Then you can go back to the main list of notes, point at a note, open the folder menu, and choose a folder to send it to. You can even send notes to multiple folders. They do not leave the main list, but they do appear inside of each of the folders they've been assigned to. Now let's loop back to the main reason I like working with Granola. My calendar in Microsoft Teams may be my primary platform, but not all of my meetings will be in Teams. If somebody sends me a meeting invitation from Zoom or Google Meet, that invitation will show up in my Outlook calendar and my calendar in Microsoft Teams. And since my Microsoft calendar is connected to Granola, it appears in my upcoming meetings there and in the Granola system menu. So I don't even need to open Granola to know that the meeting is coming up, especially since the Granola reminder will pop up when it's time for the meeting. And when I start the meeting, the connected note will open in Granola and the transcription will start. But what about when you jump into a meeting unexpectedly? I can go to Google Meet in my web browser to start or join an unscheduled meeting. Granola is running in the background, so it recognizes that a meeting has started and shows a notification. If you click Take Notes, it will open a new note and start transcribing. Or what about an in-person meeting? Think about those situations where a teammate grabs you for a quick chat. No online meeting, no email invitation, just people in a room talking. If you want to take notes, you can open Granola on your laptop or even the mobile app on your phone and start a quick note. Granola uses the microphone on your device to hear the conversation in the room and starts the transcription. And of course, after you end the transcription, it will generate the AI-enhanced notes. And all of your notes, whether they were transcribed on a computer or in the mobile app, are saved to the list in Granola. You can open your pages to review your notes and get insights from the AI assistant using any of your devices. The free 30-day trial for Granola is a great way to start. And everything we've seen here today works in that trial mode. So if you need a better system for notes or a single AI assistant that works in all of your meetings, you might want to try Granola in your next meeting. To keep learning and for more videos like this, be sure to subscribe to this channel.