Short answer: no, Granola does not save your meeting recordings. Granola's own security FAQ says meeting audio is cached temporarily while the meeting is transcribed and deleted once transcription is complete — "we do not retain audio recordings" (as of July 2026). If you're searching for how to replay a call you took notes on with Granola, the audio is already gone.
That one design decision has consequences in both directions — some good for privacy, some bad for you — so it's worth understanding exactly what Granola keeps, what it discards, and what to do if the recording itself is the thing you need.
What happens to your audio, step by step
Granola doesn't send a bot into your meeting. It captures the audio playing on your Mac (both sides of the call), transcribes it on your device, and uses the transcript — plus whatever rough notes you typed — to write up clean notes. During this window the audio exists as a temporary local cache. Once the transcript is finalized, the audio is deleted. There's no setting to keep it (as of July 2026).
So three different things have three different fates:
| What happens | Where it ends up | |
|---|---|---|
| Audio | Cached during the meeting, then deleted | Nowhere — it's gone |
| Transcript | Kept | Granola's cloud, tied to your account |
| Notes | Kept | Granola's cloud, tied to your account |
That second column matters. Deleting the audio is a genuine privacy win — nobody can leak a recording that doesn't exist. But the content of your meeting doesn't stay on your Mac: transcripts and notes sync to Granola's servers — AWS, in the United States, retained indefinitely unless you delete them or set a retention policy. And on Free and Business plans, anonymised meeting data may be used to improve Granola's models by default, with an opt-out in Settings → Data & sharing (as of July 2026). We walk through all of this in Speechmark vs Granola.
Why "the audio is gone" can bite
For most standups and syncs, you'll never miss the recording. The cases where you will are precisely the high-stakes ones:
- Verification. Transcription is good, not perfect. When the note says the client agreed to "$40k" and your memory says $14k, the recording is the referee. Without it, an AI-generated note is the only record — and no way to check which of you is wrong.
- Exact wording. "We'll try to hit March" and "we commit to March" transcribe similarly and mean different things. Nuance, hedges, and tone live in the audio.
- Disputes. If a commitment made on a call is ever contested — scope, price, who said what — a note written by an AI is a weak exhibit. The recording is the evidence, and with Granola there is nothing to produce.
Consultants scoping engagements, founders negotiating terms, and anyone in a legal- or compliance-adjacent seat should treat the raw audio as the record, not a byproduct.
If you need to keep your meeting audio
You have three honest options:
- Keep Granola, accept the trade. If you love its augmented-notes workflow and your meetings are low-stakes, audio deletion is arguably a feature. Just flip the data-sharing opt-out if the training default bothers you.
- Run a separate recorder alongside. Clunky — two apps, two permissions, and the recording lives apart from the notes it belongs to.
- Use a notes app that retains the audio. This is the case Speechmark was built for: it records and transcribes on your Mac like Granola does — no bot, on-device — but keeps the original audio next to the transcript and summary, as local files with no account and no cloud copy. One purchase, $79 per Mac. If you want the full field, including free options like BB Recorder that also store recordings locally, see our Granola alternatives roundup.
The bottom line
Granola deletes your meeting audio by design and keeps your transcripts and notes in its cloud. Whether that's the right trade depends on what your meetings are worth: if a transcript-quality note is always enough, Granola's approach is clean and genuinely privacy-conscious. If the recording is sometimes the record, you need a tool that treats it that way.