In work meetings, the future default expectation is that you are being transcribed, and you ask not to be transcribed
Pedregal explains that Granola’s invisible design was a technical necessity, describes the virtual-camera watermark it built because platforms offer no consent API, and predicts transcription will become the default expectation in workplace meetings while remaining opt-in for social settings. ✦ AI generated
Chris Pedregal · Platformer · 2026-07-30 · original ↗
“I want to ask you about a design choice you made that I think is very powerful, but that people also have feelings about, which is that Granola is invisible. There had been other AI notetakers before, and often they would involve adding a bot to a meeting. How did you come to a place where you said, we're just going to record the audio off of a laptop?”
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.
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