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In order to create great AI-enhanced notes, Granola transcribes the audio from your meetings when you choose to.

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How Granola captures transcription

Granola only records your iPhone’s microphone input. It can pick up on in-person conversations, or sound playing from other devices. Granola temporarily caches audio during the meeting - when transcription is completed, cached audio is deleted from all Granola and third-party systems.

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When does transcription begin?

Transcription begins when:
  • Starting a new note
  • Tapping ‘start notes’ for a meeting in progress from the list of upcoming meetings
  • Tapping ‘take notes’ from a live activity prompt
  • Tapping ‘start’ after opening an upcoming meeting
image.png Granola does not auto-transcribe any meetings or conversations without you manually clicking to start taking notes. If you start a note accidentally, click the X on the note in progress card to delete it.

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Transcription indicators

You can tell when Granola is transcribing in several ways:
  • On a note in progress: dancing bars respond to mic input, and the duration timer is active
  • On lock screen: live activity notification says ‘taking notes’ with the current duration
  • In dynamic island: Granola icon visible with duration timer active
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When does transcription end?

Transcription ends when you:
  • Click ‘end’ on the note card
  • Click ‘end’ on the live activity notification
Once transcription ends, the app will automatically generate your enhanced notes. It takes a bit longer than on desktop, so Granola will send you a notification when they’re ready. If your transcription is taking longer than a few minutes, please open the settings menu from your profile picture on the top-right, and tap report a bug, and include logs. This will generate an email to send to our support team - please let us know a bit of detail about what’s happened, including the date/time of your meeting and the title (if it has one).

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Pausing and resuming transcription

You can pause and resume transcription from the note in progress card. Your meeting notes won’t be generated until you click end to finalize the transcription.

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Speaker identification

The transcript will identify speakers as Speaker A, Speaker B, and so on, which should more accurately assign follow-up actions in enhanced notes. We have found that in cases where the speaker identification may not be 100% accurate, the enhanced notes usually do a good job of understanding the nuances of the conversation.

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Common transcription issues

Several issues can impact the quality of Granola’s transcription on iPhone:
  • Linguistic accuracy: When meetings are conducted in multiple languages or accents not supported by the current version of Granola, transcription may not accurately capture the dialogue
  • Background noise: While background noise can affect transcription quality, the summary feature does a good job of picking out important points from the conversation