Notion Adds AI Transcription: A Granola Competitor?

The Expanding Landscape of Meeting Transcription

Meeting transcription has become a highly sought-after capability within comprehensive productivity suites. Major players such as ClickUp and Zoom have integrated transcription, often coupled with AI-driven summaries, to compete with emerging companies in this space.

These competitors include Read AI, Zoom’s dedicated assistant, Circleback, Granola, and Otter.

Notion Enters the Arena

The latest company to join the race to develop advanced meeting transcription tools is Notion.

Notion is currently deploying an AI-powered feature designed for meeting notetaking. This functionality transcribes meetings in real-time and subsequently provides a concise summary of the key discussion points.

Users can simultaneously take their own notes while Notion’s AI is actively transcribing the meeting – a feature that bears a strong resemblance to the capabilities offered by Granola.

A Broader Productivity Vision

This new feature signifies another significant step in Notion’s evolution toward becoming a more expansive productivity suite.

The company aims to position itself as a competitor to established tech giants like Google and Microsoft.

Technical Details and Availability

Like many similar transcription services, Notion’s tool utilizes system audio for notetaking.

According to the official support documentation, the AI notetaker is presently available for Mac users running app version 4.7.0 or later.

Initial testing confirmed functionality solely on the desktop application, however, Notion has indicated that mobile app support will be implemented in the near future.

Initiating Transcription

To begin using the AI notetaking feature, navigate to any page within Notion and type “/meet.”

A dialog box will appear, emphasizing the importance of obtaining explicit consent from all meeting participants before initiating transcription.

Upon securing consent, click the “Confirm consent” button to commence the transcription process.

Summary and Formatting Options

Upon stopping the transcription, the tool automatically generates an AI-powered summary of the meeting.

Users can then access a three-dot menu to select a preferred formatting option, including Auto, Sales Call, Standup, or Team Meeting.

Language Support

The support page details that the feature currently supports transcription in over a dozen languages.

These include English, Chinese, Spanish, French, German, Japanese, Korean, Portuguese, Russian, Thai, Vietnamese, Danish, Finnish, Norwegian, Dutch, and Swedish.

Expanding Enterprise Capabilities

Alongside the meeting transcription feature, Notion is also targeting enterprise clients with additional new functionalities.

These include enterprise search, enabling searches across Notion and integrated applications, and research mode, which leverages reasoning AI models to facilitate the creation of shareable documents.

The company highlights the ease with which Notion AI can be used to pose questions related to meetings and documents, share information, or integrate meeting summaries into other work areas.

Continued Product Evolution

These recent additions build upon previous efforts to broaden Notion’s appeal beyond its core notes and documents application.

Earlier last year, the company launched Notion calendar, and just last month, it released an AI-powered email client for Gmail, which had been previously announced.