Does Granola show a summary during the meeting?
No — Granola captures your meeting's audio while the call is happening, but its AI-enhanced notes are generated after the meeting ends, not during it. While the call is live, what you have is your own notepad and the raw transcript Granola is building in the background; the polished summary arrives once you stop. If what you want is a continuously updating summary you can glance at mid-meeting, a real-time tool like Canary fills that gap with a live, multi-resolution rolling summary that updates while people are still talking.
Last updated August 11, 2026
No. Granola is listening during the meeting, but it’s not summarizing during the meeting — its AI notes are generated after you end the call.
What Granola does during the call
While a meeting is live, Granola gives you a notepad: you jot rough, fragmentary notes, and it captures the call’s system audio in the background — no bot in the participant list, no plugin. When the meeting ends, Granola’s AI merges your typed cues with the transcript and produces the clean, enhanced notes it’s known for. That document is genuinely good. It’s also, by design, an after-the-meeting artifact.
”After” isn’t a missing feature — it’s the design
Granola’s whole model needs the meeting to end: the enhancement step turns your rough notes plus the full transcript into a finished document, and a document is something you read afterward. The philosophy is that you stay present by typing less and trusting the notes will be ready later. That’s a coherent product choice — but it means that in the moment you actually need help mid-call — you drifted to Slack, someone says “thoughts?” — Granola has nothing condensed to glance at yet. The distinction is the core of post-meeting vs in-meeting AI notes, and the same line splits real-time vs after-the-meeting AI notes across the whole category.
What a live summary looks like instead
Canary sits on the same side of the bot divide as Granola — bot-free, system-audio capture, nothing joins the call — which makes this the purest timing comparison in the category. The difference is that Canary condenses the conversation while it’s happening: a live rolling summary at four resolutions (now, last 2 minutes, last 5 minutes, full call), updating as people talk, so catching up after a drift takes a glance rather than a scroll. The full head-to-head is in Canary vs Granola, and if you’re weighing the wider field, the Granola alternatives roundup covers both sides of the timing line.
The honest bottom line
If what you want from a meeting tool is a polished, shareable document afterward, Granola is one of the best bot-free tools at exactly that — the same question asked of Otter gets a different answer for a different reason (Otter shows a live transcript, which isn’t a summary either). But if the moment you’re buying for is during the call, an after-the-meeting tool can’t serve it, however good its notes are. That’s the gap a real-time summarizer exists to fill.
Frequently asked questions
What does Granola show during a meeting?
During a call, Granola gives you a notepad to jot rough notes in while it captures system audio in the background. Its AI-enhanced notes — the polished summary Granola is known for — are produced after you end the meeting, by merging what you typed with the transcript.
Is Granola real-time?
Granola's capture is real-time — it's transcribing as people speak — but its summary is not. The AI notes are generated after the meeting ends. Real-time capture and a real-time summary are different things: only the second one helps you mid-call.
Which tool shows a live summary during the meeting?
Canary shows a live, multi-resolution summary (now, last 2 minutes, last 5 minutes, and full call) during the meeting, updating continuously as people talk. Like Granola, it's bot-free and captures system audio — the difference is timing.