Fathom is adding a meeting mode without bots in an attempt to beat Granola

Online meetings these days are crowded. The abundance of note-taking assistants means that everyone has their own meeting assistant joining calls to transcribe and summarize the conversation, leading to crowded meeting rooms.

to understanda startup that makes an AI note-taking tool, is trying to address this overcrowding problem with an update that enables its app to transcribe all the calls you attend without needing an AI assistant to join it.

Now, this is nothing new. We already have many desktop applications such as Granola, spoken, an idea and ChatGPT Which can transcribe calls. Fathom says it is trying to improve on these tools by enabling its app to record videos as well, and its users can choose between different recording modes to transcribe calls.

The company said it focused on correcting speaker notes to make it easier for users to remember context.

“A lot of these non-bot tools don’t indicate who said what in the captured text,” Fathom CEO Richard White told TechCrunch over a phone call. For example, he said, many people have problems with misattribution when they ask a note-taker in their meeting a question about what they would have said in a particular meeting a few months ago.

Fathom has always wanted to launch a bot-less client for transcribing meetings, and this update has been enabled by AI improvements in the past six months across different models, White said.

Other updates include the ability to use AI to query a database of meetings, making it even more useful for businesses that can feed it broader context. The company is also releasing a Model Context Protocol (MCP) server so users can pull meeting data and connect it to their AI tools.

This last point recently sparked user complaints about Granola Next You have made changes to its on-device database and disrupt the AI ​​workflow that uses text data from that source.

Fathom is working to make its transcription data more accurate and give users more ways to record meetings, White said. The company also plans to release an iOS app that can record in-person meetings.