Google releases a new local-first Granola competitor

Google has quietly turned its local AI work into a fuller product. After an AI dictation tool in April, the same team has now shipped Google AI Edge Foresight, a Mac app aimed straight at the note-taking crowd that has been growing around Granola and similar tools.

The big hook is that it can run completely offline. Google says the app is optimized for Apple Silicon and uses the on-device EmbeddingGemma 2 model, which has 740 million parameters. That lets it capture meeting notes across apps, including notes from in-person meetings, without depending on a live connection.

The interface will look familiar to anyone who has used Granola. It uses a split screen: shorthand notes on one side, AI-generated notes on the other. Users can also keep writing manual notes while the meeting is being transcribed, then review the transcript afterward or ask a Gemma 4-powered assistant questions about what was said.

Google is also pitching the app as more than a recorder. It can take in PDFs, Google Docs, Microsoft Office files, plain text, Markdown, and web bookmarks to build a knowledge base. If something comes up in a meeting that connects to those files, the app can answer in real time.

The timing makes sense. The meeting note-taker market is already crowded, and new entrants keep showing up anyway. Wispr and Calendly have both launched their own dictation and note-taking tools in recent months, while Superhuman, which used to be Grammarly, bought YC-backed Fathom last month. Google’s earlier dictation app never became a mainstream hit, but this one could be less about immediate scale and more about showing what its offline Gemma models can do. A consumer version tied into Gemini apps is clearly another possibility.