Granola debuts an AI notepad for dating | TechCrunch

Taking meeting notes is a chore, so why not leave that task to AI? That’s the premise behind a new startup, Granola, whose AI-powered note-taking app lets you combine your notes with AI-generated ones based on a transcript of your meeting. Unlike some other AI transcription apps that try to summarize the main points of a meeting on their own, Granola takes a more collaborative approach to working with AI. You can choose to guide the AI ​​by writing down what you think were the most important things from the meeting and let the AI ​​fill in the details.

Co-founder Chris Pedregal says he was inspired to build Granola after working with GPT-3 when it was young. He experimented with different prototypes to understand how AI could be useful in his daily life. Using AI was something that led him to create his previous company, Socratic, an AI learning app that allowed people to take a picture of a homework problem and teach the user how to solve it . The company sold to Google, and Pedregal remained a tech giant for a few years before starting to rebuild.

Building various tools, including an AI diary app at one point, led to a realization.

“Through that process, I just became convinced that the LLMs [large language models] we would change the tools we use for work. It’s especially powerful when it comes to spoken language and making it useful,” Pedregal said.

He later teamed up with co-founder Sam Stephenson, who previously worked on note-taking app Ideaflow. The two first met through a dating group focused on dating tools. Like Pedregal, Stephenson was also based in London, so the two ended up meeting in real life and found they hit it off. “Now, we’re basically married,” Stephenson joked.

The two founded Granola in March 2023 with the goal of making it easier to manage meeting notes.

“People spend an insane amount of time in meetings, especially since the pandemic — like Zoom meetings in particular,” Pedregal said. Many of them are in back-to-back meetings all day with no time to review, write or clean up their previous notes. Besides, for most people, meetings are the only time they take notes; they don’t often take notes in other parts of their lives.”

Granola works to solve the note-taking problem with an app that’s essentially an AI-powered evolution of something like Apple Notes. You engage with Granola on your computer and can choose to write your own notes or bullet points, or leave it all to the AI. The app works by connecting to your calendar, then directly transcribing your Mac’s audio. This means that no dating bots are joining your online dating like with other solutions. Currently, Granola works with Zoom, Google Meet, Teams, Slack and WebEx.

The app basically works like a regular notepad, meaning you can write your notes during the meeting. Granola, however, analyzes who is in the meeting, their roles, and what the meeting is about—such as a sales call, job interview, or investor pitch. When the meeting ends, Granola adds your notes with more information, referring to the transcript as you fill them out. If you make typos or forget to capitalize things, Granola will take care of that during cleanup as well.

For example, if someone says during the meeting that the budget for a project is 10k, you can just write “10k” in your notes. When Granola returns, it will expand it to include more information, such as “Photography budget can go up to 10K”.

Granola’s notes are linked to the transcript summary, so you can check them for accuracy or simply refer to what was said in full. AI notes are also written in gray to distinguish them from your notes, in black.

The app uses Open-AI’s GPT-4o, which means you can also engage with it like ChatGPT could.

Pedregal thinks Granola is an improvement over other meeting transcription tools because it doesn’t just transcribe the meeting via AI: It lets you write your own notes and even collaborate with the AI. You can use Markdown formatting to guide the AI ​​by typing headings preceded by a pound sign, for example, and it will know to add bullet points that refer to that topic below.

“Right now we’re outsourcing a lot of our thinking to LLMs, like ChatGPt. And we have very little control over it,” said Pedregal. “You ask ChatGPT to write an email for you and it will write it and it’s magical. But then if you get it to write an email that you would actually send. .. it’s too hard. It’s almost more trouble than it’s worth. I think that’s the big question now: How do you design AI so you’re still in control? You’re still using your judgment help you do your best work?”

Fueling Granola’s startup is a $4.25 million funding round closed last year and led by Lightspeed. Other investors include Betaworks, Firstminute Capital, Otherwise, Uncommon and angels like Mike Krieger, SoleioHunter Walk, David LiebMike Hudack, Gabor Cselle and Andrew Parker.

Longer term, Pedregal says the team would like to expand beyond meetings to whatever next steps that might include, such as writing a memo, filing a bug report, planning a follow-up, and more.

Granola is free to us for the first 25 appointments, then it’s $10 a month. Over time, the startup aims to generate additional revenue by launching a team or company plan where the price can be adjusted. The app is free to download on macOS.