I’m currently feeling conflicted about my AI note-taking tools. While I see a ton of value in capturing detailed information from my daily meetings (especially when sharing with others), I’m concerned that automatically collecting notes instead of writing them myself will weaken my ability to remember and connect with the content.
This is already a bit of an issue since writing notes by hand is the best way to remember and process information, but my writing sucks, and I can type way faster than I can write. So here we are.
Tools I’ve Been Testing
Mac Whisper
This interesting app allows you to drag and drop various media files (YouTube videos, podcasts) or capture your Mac’s global audio source. It connects with AI models (I prefer Claude) to convert the audio into readable notes, which you can then refine through questions.
This app’s also been great for getting the tl:dr of YouTube videos—saving me from watching people ramble on for 10 minutes just to hit that sweet ad revenue mark.
Granola
I’ve recently switched to Granola as it offers what seems to be an ideal middle ground. It captures audio in the background while providing a scratch pad for manual note-taking during meetings.
These manual notes are then incorporated into the context when summarizing the meeting, which you can then further tailor with common templates like 1:1, interviews, or user reviews.
The Current Dilemma
While Granola seems to strike the right balance, I’ve noticed myself relying more on the automatic capture feature because the AI summaries are remarkably good. It’s created an interesting paradox: I want to take manual notes to stay engaged, but the AI-generated notes are consistently more comprehensive than what I could produce myself.
I also appreciate its thoughtful design features, like the automatic “meeting active” notifications that remind me to enable the app during calls (I tend to forget to turn these things on).
Though it occasionally gives false negatives in my browser (Arc), particularly with web-based meeting platforms, it’s still the best solution I’ve found (so far).
We’ll see where this space evolves.
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