During one of my courses, with Granola transcribing the session, I asked it what we had covered so far. The class was still going on. It pulled together the topics we had discussed, including the demonstration I had just given. The notes were already useful before the session had ended.
A lot of our thinking happens in conversations. We explain why an idea won’t work, negotiate a constraint or help someone work through a problem. Granola makes that context available to ask questions of and use in the work that follows. I’ve been exploring several ways to do this in my courses and workshops.
While a meeting is going on, you can query what has been said so far. In an interview, ask what follow-up would help you understand a candidate’s account of a project. In a customer conversation, ask which concern you haven’t followed up on. Before closing a planning meeting, ask which questions remain unanswered. Or simply ask what you missed when you lost the thread. The conversation itself supplies the context for a useful next question.
Afterwards, those notes can become a follow-up email, a project brief or preparation for the next discussion. You can ask what was agreed, what remains open and who committed to doing something. The explanation behind a decision is available alongside the decision, which is useful when you need to carry it into another piece of work.
Across meetings, you can look for patterns that no individual summary would reveal. In that course, I also asked Granola what advice I most commonly give founders in one-on-one conversations. It looked across about twenty calls and returned recurring themes: narrow your focus; validate before building. It pointed me to the conversations behind them. I hadn’t written a document collecting these ideas. I had said them repeatedly to people facing different problems. Customer interviews, project discussions and recurring one-on-ones offer similar material to work with.
There doesn’t have to be another person in the conversation. Granola can capture a solo thinking session too. Speak through a problem, explain what you’ve tried and why you’re stuck, then work with the note. I also dictate emails, prompts and building instructions using speech-to-text tools. Speaking lets me give the AI more of the thinking behind a request without first turning it into a tidy written prompt.
Granola’s Recipes let you save useful prompts and reuse them. Its MCP connector lets compatible AI tools draw on your meeting notes, carrying that context into work elsewhere.
I’ll explore these uses in The Voice-First AI Stack for People Who Live in Meetings, a free Maven lightning lesson on 27 October, part of a campaign with Maven and Granola. We’ll work through how spoken input, meeting notes and connected agents can help us use more of the thinking we’re already doing.