Google launches AI Edge Foresight, an offline Granola rival for Mac

Google has released Google AI Edge Foresight, a Mac app that takes AI-powered meeting notes entirely on-device, positioning it as an offline competitor to the popular note-taker Granola.

The app runs completely offline using the on-device EmbeddingGemma 2 model, which has 740 million parameters. It captures meeting notes across apps, including in-person meetings, and is optimized for Apple Silicon, according to the company's FAQ page. That means users can work with their meeting notes while traveling or in places without an internet connection.

The release comes from the same team that shipped an experimental local-first AI dictation tool earlier in April, which worked with local models but never reached mainstream usage.

How does AI Edge Foresight compare to Granola?

The app borrows Granola's signature split-screen layout. Users write shorthand notes on one side of the screen while AI-generated notes appear on the other. Like Granola, it supports manual note-taking during live transcription.

Beyond that baseline, Google adds two capabilities:

• A full meeting transcript view.
• A chat assistant powered by Gemma 4 that answers questions about the meeting.

The app also accepts uploaded documents — PDFs, Google Docs, Microsoft Office formats, plain text, Markdown, and web bookmarks — to build a personal knowledge base. When a point related to that knowledge base comes up during a meeting, Foresight can surface answers in real time by combining meeting notes with the stored documents.

Why is Google shipping this now?

The dictation app from April was an experiment that didn't make it to mainstream usage. Foresight may serve a similar purpose: a showcase for what Google's Gemma series of offline models can do on consumer hardware.

But the company could go further. As the source notes, Google could release a consumer version of a meeting note-taker that works across video calling apps through its Gemini apps, relying on its cloud models instead of local ones.

That matters because the meeting note-taker market is both competitive and crowded — and still attracting new entrants. In the last few months, dictation company Wispr and scheduling company Calendly have both released their own notetakers. Last month, productivity startup Superhuman (formerly Grammarly) acquired YC-backed notetaker Fathom.

For Google, an offline-capable note-taker is also a demonstration of a broader shift: pushing capable models like the 740-million-parameter EmbeddingGemma 2 onto Apple Silicon Macs, where privacy and connectivity constraints make local processing attractive. If Foresight graduates from showcase to product, it would put Google in direct competition with Granola and a wave of well-funded rivals in a space that keeps consolidating.