This AI notetaker won't sell surveillance to your boss

Chris Pedregal: The reason we made that decision was not so that Granola was hidden. I really don't like bots, but that wasn't the original goal. The original goal was that we thought it was really important for Granola to always work. It didn't matter if you were in a Slack huddle or a Zoom meeting or an in-person meeting: if you hit start, it just starts transcribing. And the only way to do that is by using the system audio on your computer. We also didn't like bots because we thought they're a really inelegant, dehumanizing force in a meeting. The downside of our approach, though, is that when you use Granola out of the box, other people don't know you're using it. So we're placing the onus on the user to tell others that they're using Granola. And that's actually not our choice. If there were an easy way that didn't involve a bot to make that visible, we would do it — that's where social norms are going anyway, and it's just good for everybody to know whether you're being transcribed or not. The problem is that the Zooms and the Meets of the world make this almost impossible, because they're pushing their own note-taking systems. There's no API call where we could ask everyone in a meeting for consent — we would do that. So we've had to go to some crazy lengths. This is actually a virtual camera on your computer, and we are injecting this into the video feed before it hits the Zooms or the Google Meets out there, because that's the only way we can control how it shows up and make sure it shows up. I do think social norms are going to evolve, I think the video conferencing platforms are going to give us more control, and I think we'll end up in a good place. I think we'll probably end up in a world where in work meetings, the expectation is that you are being transcribed by default, and you ask not to be transcribed. I hope that in social environments, the default continues to be that you're not being transcribed, and you ask to transcribe.

Chris Pedregal: I'm always afraid this will sound like bullshit to people who don't know me, but basically, I think we are like 5 percent into this new technical revolution. It's like the personal computer just dropped, and no one really knows what to do with it, and the only thing you can do right now is word processing — which is powerful. But spreadsheets haven't come out yet. The GUI hasn't come out yet. I feel like we're in that moment in history, and transcription and meeting notes feel like the first little thing that's useful. And the future — what's ahead of us — is the prize: how can these new tools actually change the way you work, and make you do better work, faster, smarter? Augment you to do more than you can do today. Every big company is also chasing after that, so it's going to be super competitive. We just happened — I think through luck — to stumble upon transcription as one of the most valuable data sources for that future, and that's why everyone's going after it. The short answer is: if all we were going to be is a transcription and meeting-notes company, then I'd be really worried. But to me, the battle is much bigger, and it's ahead of us. So I'm worried about that future world, not today's existing world.

Chris Pedregal: It's something that's been on our mind from the beginning. Another design choice we made — unlike, I think, anybody at the time — is that we never stored the audio. We have access to the audio, we could have access to the video, and we never, ever stored the audio, because we wanted Granola to feel like a notepad. At first, we were actually going to delete the transcripts: you'd get the notes, and then we'd delete the transcript. We realized we shouldn't do that — the transcripts are super valuable, and if you want to regenerate your notes, you need the original source material. Every time a new technology comes up, you have to be thoughtful around the design choices you make, and then society will adapt. I'm very glad we decided not to store the audio — that was the right call. Right now we're looking into whether we should delete the transcript automatically after a certain amount of time for all users. There's a lot of value there that's lost, so we're doing research into compressing it. You probably don't need a verbatim transcript of a conversation you had three years ago, but you might want to still go back and chat with that meeting. There's usefulness and invasiveness, and you need to thread the needle between those two, so you get as much usefulness for the least amount of invasiveness.

Chris Pedregal: I think that's a great point. Tools are the reason humans can do what they've achieved. There's an amazing quote, which is: we shape our tools, and thereafter our tools shape us. And I think in the age of AI, it's really important: does AI feel like it is my tool — meaning I control it, and it makes me better — or is it the company's tool, or the government's tool, or the system's tool? In which case, it feels completely different. And the irony's not lost on me, because we are a tool that individuals use, but that, for the most part, companies pay for. So we make sure the notes are yours and private, and we want Granola to feel like the most personal AI, but in the workplace. I really do think thoughtful design of the tools we create matters. It's the same way people stopped going to libraries and started Googling everything. In some ways, that was great, because information was accessible really quickly. The downside is that humanity is now learning a lot of stuff from SEO-optimized, crappy content, as opposed to well-researched work. That's not what Larry and Sergey wanted to happen — their motivation was: let's make information accessible and useful. But that's a weird consequence of the tool they built. And I think the unintended consequences of the design decisions we make around AI tools might be really, really big. So — good luck to all of us, I guess.