Transcription issues

Testing if Granola is able to transcribe your meetings

To test if transcription is set up correctly:

1. Open our demo meeting video

2. Click “New Note” in Granola

3. You should see some dancing green bars at the bottom of the note

4. Click these to open the transcription window, and you should see text appearing in grey

5. Start speaking: you should see more transcription from your own voice in green

If this isn’t working, this usually means we can’t connect to our transcription API, and there are a few different things you should try.

Not working? Here are some common fixes

1. Restart Granola

This resets the connection to our transcription provider and often resolves connection issues.

1. Find the Granola ‘g’ icon in your system tray (top right of your screen on Mac, bottom right on Windows under the ^ icon).

2. Right click the ‘g’ icon

3. Click “Restart Granola"

Try testing again using the above steps.

2. Check system audio settings

Granola uses your system audio to transcribe, so in your System Settings, your Output and Input devices need to match the devices you’re using in Google Meet/Teams/Slack or any other virtual meeting software you’re using.

Mac

On Mac, you can find the relevant settings under System Settings > Sound > Audio, and then check both Output and Input.

Windows 11

In Windows 11, the settings are found under Settings > System > Sound.

Check that these devices line up with what you're using. Ideally do this while you're testing Granola.

Click into each of your selected audio devices (input and output):

Some audio devices also have settings that interfere with Granola, so we recommend turning these off. For each audio device, switch the ‘Audio Enhancements’ setting to ‘Off’.

Windows 10

In Windows 10, the settings are found under Settings > System > Sound > Playback

3. Check audio permissions

Make sure Granola has permission to access your system audio:

1. Open System Settings

2. Go to Privacy & Security > Microphone

3. Find Granola in the list and make sure it’s toggled on

4. Repeat for Screen & System Audio recording

4. Test audio mixing software/hardware settings

Some hardware devices or software that add extra processing on audio can interfere with Granola - such as USB microphone amplifiers, or audio mixing software that combines audio from multiple microphone streams.

If you try disabling or bypassing these, and Granola starts working, these may be the culprit.

You may still be able to use these by checking the following things:

• Disable any 'pass-through' options - this will turn a microphone input into both an input and output device, meaning that your microphone audio will be transcribed in Granola as though it was from others in your meeting.

• For stereo inputs/outputs, make sure your input/output audio is sent to the Left channel (or both Left and Right). Granola expects mono audio, but if your audio devices are set to stereo then it will read the Left audio channel.

• Make sure any voice chat/microphones are routed to Granola as well as any call software

5. Restart your PC

Occasionally, the processes we use to transcribe system audio crash, and restarting Granola doesn’t fix this, but restarting your computer does, so try this if the steps above haven’t helped.

6. Network troubleshooting

If you’re still having issues getting Granola to transcribe, this may be due to your networking set-up.

• For some users, Granola cannot resolve the domain name for our transcription API. Try using 8.8.8.8 as your DNS server.

• For some users, Granola cannot establish a TLS connection to our APIs. Things we have seen that work:

  • turn off your VPN

  • remove untrusted certificates from Keychain

  • Whitelist the following domains:

    • api.granola.ai and all subdomains, including stream.api.granola.ai

    • *.lambda-url.us-east-1.on.aws

    • api.deepgram.com, our transcription API provider

• For some users, some connections are dropped or time out. Try adjusting or removing your firewall.