Granola is an AI notepad that runs on your Mac and helps you turn brief notes into detailed meeting summaries. It works by listening to your computer's audio and combining what it hears with what you type. This works great for virtual meetings on Zoom, Teams, or Google Meet, but recording in-person meetings is trickier since Granola needs audio coming through your computer.

Using your Mac's built-in microphone

The simplest way to record in-person meetings is to use your Mac's built-in microphone. Put your MacBook in the center of the room where it can pick up everyone's voice. Open Granola and start taking notes like you normally would. The AI will use both the audio from your microphone and your notes to create a summary afterward.

Say you're in a conference room with five people discussing quarterly plans. Put your laptop in the middle of the table and jot down key points as people talk. Granola will combine everything into a proper summary later. The main issue is audio quality - everyone needs to speak clearly, and it's harder for Granola to tell who's talking since there's only one microphone instead of everyone having their own.

Creating a hybrid meeting

Another approach is to create a hybrid meeting even when everyone is in the same room. Have all participants join a Zoom or Teams call from their own devices while sitting together. This sounds weird, but it gives Granola clear audio from each person's microphone, which it handles much better.

For example, if six team members are meeting about product development, each person joins the same Zoom meeting from their laptop while sitting around the table. Granola records it like any virtual meeting, with good speaker identification and clear audio. The tricky part is avoiding feedback - everyone needs to use headphones or mute their speakers.

Getting better audio with external microphones

If you do a lot of in-person meetings, you might want to buy a USB conference microphone. These are designed for meeting rooms and capture voices from all directions much better than your laptop's built-in mic. Connect it to your Mac and Granola will use it automatically.

Recording on your phone (sort of)

Since Granola only works on Mac right now, you can't record meetings on your phone. But if you're stuck somewhere without your computer, you could record on your phone and play it back through your Mac speakers later while taking notes in Granola. It's not ideal but works for important meetings you can't reschedule.

How Granola compares to other tools

It's worth mentioning that other tools like Circleback work better for in-person meetings since they have mobile apps designed for this. But Granola is better at combining your notes with AI summaries, so it depends what you need.

Tips for better in-person recording

A few things make in-person recording work better. Pick quiet rooms with good acoustics - conference rooms with carpet work better than echoing spaces. Tell people they're being recorded since this usually makes them speak more clearly. And keep taking notes during the meeting, especially speaker names and key decisions, since this helps Granola create better summaries.

The limitations

Recording in-person meetings with Granola will never be as smooth as virtual meetings since that's not what it was built for. The biggest problem is telling speakers apart when multiple people talk at once or have similar voices. Virtual meetings give each person a separate audio feed, but in-person recordings have everyone on one track.

The tool might add better in-person features later, and they're working on Windows and mobile versions. But for now, these workarounds are your best option if you want to use Granola for face-to-face meetings.