Why I'm Building Another AI Meeting Notes Tool Instead of Using Granola.ai

Everyone told me Granola was the answer.

Bot-free transcription, clean AI summaries, no interruptions. I installed it, opened it, and got this:

"Sign in with your Google Workspace account."

I have a personal Gmail only. That was the end of that.

I'm not complaining about Granola — it's a genuinely good product. But it's built for a specific person: someone inside a US/EU company, on a corporate Google or Microsoft account, doing meetings in English.

That's not most of the world.

The tools I tried either required a work account to unlock basic features, produced garbage transcripts the moment someone switched to Spanish or Portuguese, or trapped my notes inside their app with no real way out.

That last one frustrated me more than anything. After an hour-long call, you want your notes somewhere useful — in Notion, in a doc you send to a client, in your own folder. Not locked behind a share link in someone else's platform.

So I built CallBro.ai

The rules were simple:

Any email works. Personal Gmail, Outlook, a random address — doesn't matter. No workspace account, no calendar integration required unless you want it.

It has to work in Spanish, Portuguese, and other languages as well as it does in English. Not "we support 14 languages" in fine print while the AI summaries are clearly written for an English meeting. Actually work.

Export has to be real. Markdown, DOCX, PDF — take your notes and go. No lock-in.

And like Granola, no bot joins your call. CallBro captures audio at the system level. Nobody gets a "CallBro is recording this meeting" notification. The conversation stays natural.

It's still early. Windows support is coming. There's a lot left to build.

But if you're a freelancer, a founder doing international calls, a consultant who works in multiple languages — or just someone who doesn't have a corporate Google account — give it a try. Free to start, no card required.

I'd genuinely love to hear if this solves the same problem for you that it solved for me.

https://callbro.ai/