Granola AI Playbook: Recipes, Chat, Briefs and Templates

Granola's AI layer is included on every plan, the free Basic plan too: enhanced notes, custom templates, Recipes and Granola Chat across meetings all work at $0 per user per month. What Basic holds back is depth and the extras around the call. Chat on Basic reads only the last 30 days of notes and runs on the Auto model, while pre-meeting briefs, follow-up emails and model selection start on Business at $14 per user per month, billed monthly ^[1]. The verdict is simple. Learn the workflow on Basic, then upgrade when you need full history or meeting prep.

How Granola turns rough notes into a finished page

Granola's core AI move happens after the call. It takes the transcript, whatever rough notes you typed and the calendar event, and writes enhanced notes from them. Your own words stay black and the AI additions appear gray. A Zoom In control shows the transcript quotes a line is based on, the quickest check before you share a summary. Typing is optional. Granola works with no typed notes, but jotting the two or three points you care about gives the enhancement something to build around. Granola says it uses a blend of models, primarily from OpenAI and Anthropic.

Each meeting is processed on its own, so correcting one note teaches Granola nothing for the next. If a note misses, regenerate it with feedback in Chat, a different template or the regenerate button; iPhone notes are regenerated from the desktop app. Templates decide the note's shape. The default is always Auto and cannot be changed, but on macOS and Windows you can pick another template during the call or afterward. Custom templates are created and applied only on desktop, are private by default, and can be shared with your organization only from a company email domain.

Recipes: the prompts you would otherwise retype

Recipes are reusable saved prompts that pull an answer out of your meetings in one click ^[2]. You open them with the slash key in the Chat bar or from a Recipes tab split into Discover, My recipes and Workspace recipes. Granola says there are 29+ pre-built recipes, and they are on every plan. The difference from a template is timing. A template shapes the note itself, while a recipe runs a question against notes that already exist, such as extracting feature requests or drafting a follow-up email.

Three rules shape how you write them. Each recipe is either single-meeting or multi-meeting, never both, so a question for one call and for a whole quarter needs two recipes. Recipes are static prompts with no variables, so phrase them generically: the client in this meeting, not a named account. On Basic every recipe runs on Auto, while Business and Enterprise choose a model per recipe from OpenAI, Anthropic and Google. You can publish a recipe to the workspace or share it by link, and link holders can use and remix it without seeing the owner's notes.

Granola Chat: questions across months of meetings

Chat is where history pays off. You can ask across all meetings, one meeting, a folder or space, selected meetings, or a People or Companies record (desktop only). Chat runs on macOS, Windows, iOS and Android, but not on iPad. Answers cite their sources, and Coverage Notes list what Chat looked at and how much context it reviewed. Granola says it designed Chat to read about 100 meetings at a high level rather than 10 in detail. For precise detail from one call, scope the question to that meeting.

The plan sets how far back Chat sees. On Basic, Chat reads the last 30 days of notes and Granola picks the model. Business and Enterprise read the full note history and offer model selection from OpenAI, Anthropic and Google. Fable 5.1 is not on Basic, is available on Business, and stays off on Enterprise until an admin enables it. Basic's older notes are hidden, not deleted, and return on upgrade, as our pricing guide explains. Your Chat history stays private to you, even on a shared note.

A few limits shape daily use. File upload for extra context works on desktop only. Chat reads meeting data and uploaded files, not your email or to-do lists. On desktop it can rewrite sections of a note, and it can draft a Gmail email, a Slack message or a Google Calendar event; nothing goes out until you confirm the draft. Outlook and Microsoft Calendar are not supported yet for these actions. One trap catches new users. The microphone icon in the desktop Chat bar is dictation for a question, not a meeting transcription.

Before and after the call: briefs and follow-up emails

Pre-meeting briefs are the clearest reason to pay. They need Business or Enterprise and a connected Google Calendar; Microsoft Calendar is not supported yet ^[3]. Granola gathers them overnight, usually as 2-3 bullet points, on macOS, Windows and iOS, from your previous notes, shared workspace notes, the wider web including LinkedIn, calendar details and, optionally, Gmail. Briefs appear only for meetings with people outside your organization, and Granola skips them when it finds too little information. Internal standups get nothing.

Follow-up emails need a paid plan or an active trial, Google sign-in and a connected Gmail with read and send access. Granola drafts them only for meetings with at least one external guest and no more than 10 people. Attachments are capped at 25 MB in total, a send can be undone within about 10 seconds, and drafts wait on the home screen for 3 days. Edits to a draft stay on that device. Outlook shops lose both features for now.

Is the upgrade worth it? Business costs $14 per user per month, billed monthly, which comes to $168 a year per user by our arithmetic; Granola sells no annual Business plan. A user with 40 meetings a month pays $0.35 per meeting, and at 10 meetings a month, $1.40. Do the sum for the whole team, though. In a paid workspace every active member, admins included, is a billed seat, so you cannot upgrade only the people who want briefs.

People, companies, customer calls and voice typing

People and Companies views build themselves from calendar attendee lists when notes are created, enriched with photos, job titles and company information. You cannot add a person or company by hand. On Basic they draw on a 30-day rolling window, while paid plans show the full history. Pointing Chat at a company record is a quick account review: every note tied to that account, shared notes included, with no tagging. It depends on real attendee emails in your calendar invites.

Customer calls, on Business and Enterprise and still rolling out, detects external sales and customer calls and shares their notes to a Customer calls folder; restricting who contributes or views is Enterprise only. Vocabulary helps the AI too. Each user can add 30 personal jargon terms, and on Business admins can set a workspace dictionary of up to 50 terms. Both boost recognition of names and product words, but neither replaces one word with another, so a misheard term still needs fixing in the note.

Voice typing is the odd one out. It is a beta dictation tool in the Mac desktop app, free on every plan, with Windows and mobile listed as coming soon. It works in other apps rather than in meetings, and a single dictation can run up to 20 minutes. Screen context reads on-screen text through macOS Accessibility, takes no screenshots and skips password fields. Granola claims it is 4x faster than typing.

What the AI does with your meeting data

Granola does not let third parties such as OpenAI or Anthropic train on your data. It does train its own models on anonymized (de-identified) data unless each user opts out with a toggle in Settings ^[4]; Enterprise workspaces are opted out by default. Opting out does not remove data already incorporated into models. On Business each user opts out individually, and the toggle is not yet in the Android app. Decide before the first meeting.

Fable 5.1 follows a different rule. With it, Anthropic keeps agent input and output logs for 30 days, so those chats are not under zero data retention, and the model is unavailable in HIPAA workspaces, which exist only on Enterprise. Deleting a transcript is permanent: notes cannot be regenerated afterward and Chat answers about that meeting become limited. For dictation, Granola's providers do not train on what you say, and audio from successful dictations is never kept.

The bottom line

Granola's AI is genuinely usable for free: enhanced notes, templates, Recipes and Chat all run on Basic, limited by a 30-day window and the Auto model. Business at $14 per user per month, billed monthly, adds full-history Chat, model choice, pre-meeting briefs and follow-up emails, and those extras lean on Google Calendar and Gmail. Teams on Outlook should weigh that gap first. Build two or three shared recipes early, scope Chat tightly, and settle the training toggle before your first meeting.