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Glossary

Turning a Granola recording into notes needs a connection.

Granola documents a VPN, firewall or corporate network as causes of notes failing to generate, because note generation needs its transcription API.

· 3 min read

On this page (5)
  1. What that means in practice
  2. Why this is architectural, not a bug
  3. Where Coii AudioNotes differs
  4. What to do if you rely on Granola somewhere unreliable
  5. If offline matters more than anything else

No, not fully. Checked against Granola's own troubleshooting docs today: note generation needs a transcript to work from — "if there's no transcript, the note generation won't have any content to work with" — and Granola's network troubleshooting guide lists a corporate network, a VPN or a firewall among the things that "can interfere with Granola's connection and cause note generation to fail." Neither page states outright what happens to a meeting recorded through a sustained outage; what they document is that the connection failing is a named, expected cause of notes not generating.

What that means in practice

Working from a train through a tunnel, a flight without wifi, or an office network that a firewall or VPN interferes with are exactly the situations Granola's own troubleshooting docs point to as causes of notes failing to generate. In any of those, the recording itself may or may not be affected — that isn't documented either way — but the notes that recording is supposed to become don't exist until the transcription service is reachable again.

Why this is architectural, not a bug

Granola's transcription runs through a remote API rather than on the machine doing the recording — the troubleshooting docs list transcription API domains a firewall has to allow through, which only makes sense if that step happens on a server. That's a reasonable design choice for a cloud product, but it means offline is a degraded mode rather than a supported one: the app can hold onto audio while disconnected, but the thing the user actually wants — readable notes — waits on the network the same way any cloud service's output does.

Where Coii AudioNotes differs

Coii AudioNotes transcribes on the Mac doing the recording, segment by segment, while the meeting is still happening, and the summary is generated by a language model bundled with the app rather than a remote one. Nothing about that pipeline depends on a connection — a flight, a basement conference room, or a network outage doesn't change when the transcript or the minutes are ready, because there's no remote API for either step to wait on. See what local transcription actually means for the underlying distinction, and Coii AudioNotes against Granola for the fuller comparison, including where Granola is ahead on integrations and team features that have nothing to do with connectivity.

What to do if you rely on Granola somewhere unreliable

There's no setting to change that fixes this — the dependency on the transcription API isn't something a toggle in Granola's preferences turns off. The practical workaround people report is recording locally with whatever's already on the Mac as a backup — Voice Memos, QuickTime — for the sessions where the network is the risk, then letting Granola generate its notes once the connection is reliably back. That's a second recording to manage for exactly the meetings where you can least afford to lose one, which is the actual cost of the dependency rather than a hypothetical one.

If offline matters more than anything else

A single dropped meeting is an inconvenience; a job that regularly happens somewhere without reliable network is a different requirement entirely. Best Granola alternatives and offline meeting transcription tools both cover the wider field for that case, and offline meeting transcription on a Mac goes through what running the whole session — recording, transcript and summary — without a connection actually requires.

Questions

What happens if my connection drops mid-meeting in Granola?
Granola's own troubleshooting docs name a VPN, firewall or corporate network as things that interfere with its connection and cause note generation to fail, since generating notes needs a transcript to work from.
Is there a Granola setting to work fully offline?
Not currently documented. Its transcription runs through a remote API, listed by domain in its own network troubleshooting guide — so a connection to that API is what note generation depends on.