We decided from the beginning to never, ever store the audio, because we wanted Granola to feel like a notepad

Pedregal explains Granola’s foundational decision to never store audio, the consideration of also deleting transcripts, and the ongoing research into compressing old transcripts into a "working memory" to balance usefulness with invasiveness. ✦ AI generated

Chris Pedregal · Platformer · 2026-07-30 · original ↗

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.

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