Recording in-person meetings with Granola – Workarounds

Granola is an AI notepad for macOS, Windows, iPhone and Android that helps you turn brief notes into detailed meeting summaries. On a computer it listens to your computer's audio and combines what it hears with what you type. This works great for virtual meetings on Zoom, Teams, or Google Meet. For in-person meetings, you can use Granola's phone app or one of the laptop setups below.

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

Granola has iPhone and Android apps, so you can take notes on your phone for walking meetings, conferences or coffee catchups when your laptop isn't with you.

How Granola compares to other tools

For in-person meetings, we recommend Circleback. Its iPhone, Android and Apple Watch apps record in-person meetings and turn them into notes and action items. Circleback also lets you add your own notes before or during the meeting and uses them to shape the AI notes, so you keep the habit of jotting down key points. Here's how to get AI notes for in-person meetings on iPhone and Android with Circleback.

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.

Granola's phone apps help when you're away from your laptop, and these workarounds help when you use Granola on a computer for face-to-face meetings. If they aren't enough, see our list of Granola alternatives.