OpenGranola

A meeting note-taker that talks back.

OpenGranola sits next to your call, transcribes both sides of the conversation in real time, and searches your own notes to surface things worth saying — right when you need them.

Think of it as Granola on steroids: it doesn't just take notes, it reads the room, digs through your knowledge base, and hands you the perfect talking point before the moment passes.

Features

• Invisible to the other side — the app window is hidden from screen sharing by default, so no one knows you're using it
• Fully offline transcription — speech recognition runs entirely on your Mac; no audio ever leaves the device
• Pick any LLM — suggestions are generated through OpenRouter, so you can use whichever model you want (GPT-4o, Claude, Gemini, Llama, etc.)
• Live transcript — see both sides of the conversation as it happens, copy the whole thing with one click
• Auto-saved sessions — every conversation is automatically saved as a plain-text transcript and a structured session log, no manual export needed
• Knowledge base search — point it at a folder of notes and it pulls in what's relevant using Voyage AI embeddings

How it works

1. You start a call and hit Live
2. OpenGranola transcribes both speakers locally on your Mac
3. When the conversation hits a moment that matters — a question, a decision point, a claim worth backing up — it searches your notes and surfaces relevant talking points
4. You sound prepared because you are

Download

Grab the latest DMG from the Releases page.

Or build from source:

./scripts/build_swift_app.sh

Quick start

1. Open the DMG and drag OpenGranola to Applications
2. Launch the app and grant microphone + screen capture permissions
3. Open Settings (Cmd+,) and add your Voyage AI and OpenRouter API keys
4. Point it at a folder of .md or .txt files — that's your knowledge base
5. Click Idle to go live

The first run downloads the local speech model (~600 MB).

What you need

• Apple Silicon Mac, macOS 26+
• Xcode 26 / Swift 6.2
• OpenRouter API key (for suggestions)
• Voyage AI API key (for knowledge base search)

Knowledge base

Point the app at a folder of Markdown or plain text files. That's it. OpenGranola chunks, embeds, and caches them locally. When the conversation shifts, it searches your notes and only surfaces what's actually relevant.

Works well with meeting prep docs, research notes, pitch decks, competitive analysis, customer briefs — anything you'd want at your fingertips during a call.

Privacy

• Speech is transcribed locally — audio never leaves your Mac
• Knowledge base chunks are sent to Voyage AI for embedding (text only, no audio)
• Conversation context + relevant notes are sent to OpenRouter to generate suggestions
• API keys are stored in your Mac's Keychain
• The app window is hidden from screen sharing by default
• Transcripts are saved locally to ~/Documents/OpenGranola/

Build

# Full build → sign → install to /Applications
./scripts/build_swift_app.sh

# Dev build only
cd OpenGranola && swift build -c debug

# Package DMG
./scripts/make_dmg.sh

Optional env vars for code signing and notarization: CODESIGN_IDENTITY, APPLE_ID, APPLE_TEAM_ID, APPLE_APP_PASSWORD.

Repo layout

OpenGranola/          SwiftUI app (Swift Package)
scripts/              Build, sign, and package scripts
assets/               Screenshot and app icon source

License

MIT