Taking assembly notes is a chore, so why not go away that activity to AI? That’s the premise behind a brand new startup, Granola, whose AI-powered notepad app helps you to mix your personal notes with these created by AI based mostly on a transcript of your assembly. In contrast to another AI transcription apps that attempt to summarize the important thing factors of a gathering on their very own, Granola takes a extra collaborative strategy to working with AI. You may decide to information the AI by writing down what you suppose a very powerful takeaways had been from the assembly and permit the AI to fill within the particulars.
Co-founder Chris Pedregal says he was impressed to construct Granola after working with GPT-3 when it was new. He experimented with completely different prototypes to determine how AI may very well be helpful in his on a regular basis life. AI’s utility was one thing that drove him to create his prior firm, Socratic, an AI tutoring app that allowed folks to take a photograph of a homework drawback and have it train the consumer how you can resolve it. The corporate bought to Google, and Pedregal stayed on the tech large for a few years earlier than getting the itch to construct once more.
Constructing completely different instruments, together with an AI journaling app at one level, led to a realization.
“By means of that course of, I simply turned satisfied that LLMs [large language models] had been going to alter the instruments we use for work. It’s particularly highly effective on the subject of spoken language and making that helpful,” Pedregal mentioned.
He later teamed up with co-founder Sam Stephenson, who beforehand labored on the note-taking app Ideaflow. The 2 initially met via a meetup group targeted on instruments for assembly. Like Pedregal, Stephenson was additionally based mostly in London, so the 2 ended up assembly in actual life and located they obtained alongside. “Now we’re mainly married,” Stephenson joked.
The 2 based Granola in March 2023 with the purpose of constructing it simpler to handle assembly notes.
“Folks spend a loopy period of time in conferences, particularly for the reason that pandemic — like Zoom conferences particularly,” Pedregal mentioned. Many are in back-to-back conferences all day with out time to evaluation, write or clear up their prior notes. As well as, for most individuals, conferences are the one time they take notes; they don’t typically take notes in different components of their lives.”
Granola works to unravel the note-taking drawback with an app that’s basically an AI-powered evolution of one thing like Apple Notes. You have interaction with Granola in your pc, and you may select to write down your personal notes or bullet factors, or go away all of it as much as the AI. The app works by connecting to your calendar, then transcribing the Mac’s audio immediately. Meaning no assembly bots are becoming a member of your on-line conferences, as with different options. Presently, Granola works with Zoom, Google Meet, Groups, Slack and WebEx.
The app basically works like an everyday notepad, that means you may kind your personal notes throughout the assembly. Granola, nevertheless, analyzes who’s within the assembly, their roles and what the assembly is about — like a gross sales name, job interview or investor pitch, for instance. When the assembly wraps, Granola augments your notes with extra info, referencing the transcript because it fleshes them out. Should you make typos or overlook to capitalize issues, Granola will deal with that throughout the cleanup, too.
For instance, if somebody says throughout the assembly {that a} challenge’s price range is $10K, you would possibly simply write “10K” in your notes. When Granola comes again in, it is going to broaden that to incorporate extra info, like “Images price range can go as much as 10K.”
Granola’s notes are hyperlinked to the transcript abstract so you may fact-check them for accuracy or simply reference what was mentioned in full. The AI notes are additionally written in grey to distinguish them from your personal notes, in black.
The app makes use of OpenAI’s GPT-4o, which implies you may also have interaction with it as you’d ChatGPT.
Pedregal thinks Granola is an enchancment over different assembly transcription instruments, as a result of it doesn’t simply summarize the assembly through AI: It lets you write your personal notes and even collaborate with the AI. You should use Markdown formatting to information the AI by typing out headings preceded by a pound signal, for instance, and it’ll know so as to add bullet factors referencing that subject beneath.
“Proper now we’re outsourcing lots of our considering to LLMs, like ChatGPt. And now we have little or no management over it,” Pedregal mentioned. “You ask ChatGPT to write down an e-mail for you and it’ll write it and it’s magical. However then should you get it to write down an e-mail that you’d truly ship … it’s tremendous laborious. It’s virtually extra bother than it’s price. I believe that’s the large query proper now: How do you design AI so that you simply’re nonetheless in management? You’re nonetheless utilizing your judgment, however it’s serving to you do your greatest work?”
Fueling Granola’s launch is a $4.25 million spherical of funding, closed final yr and led by Lightspeed. Different buyers embrace Betaworks, Firstminute Capital, In any other case, Unusual and angels like Mike Krieger, Soleio, Hunter Stroll, David Lieb, Mike Hudack, Gabor Cselle and Andrew Parker.
Longer-term, Pedregal says the crew want to broaden past conferences to regardless of the subsequent steps could contain, like writing a memo, submitting a bug report, scheduling a follow-up and extra.
Granola is free to make use of for the primary 25 conferences, then is an affordable $10 per 30 days. Over time, the startup goals to generate extra income with the launches of a crew or firm plan the place pricing could also be adjusted. The app is free to obtain on macOS.
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