Google AI Edge Foresight: Offline Granola Rival for Mac

Google AI Edge Foresight: Offline Granola Rival for Mac

Google has a new meeting note-taker, and it does not need the cloud. The app is called Google AI Edge Foresight. It runs on the Mac and is built to work fully offline. It is a direct competitor to Granola, the popular AI note-taker, and to the many similar tools that have appeared over the past year.

It comes from the same Google team that released an AI dictation tool in April. That tool also worked with local models.

What the app does

Foresight captures meeting notes across different apps, including notes from in-person meetings. To do this on the device, Google uses its EmbeddingGemma 2 model, which has 740 million parameters.

Granola users will find the layout familiar. The screen is split in two:

  • One side is for your own quick shorthand notes.
  • The other side shows notes generated by the AI.

As in Granola, you can type manual notes while the meeting is being transcribed. Google adds two options on top. You can open the full transcript, or you can ask questions about the meeting through a chat assistant powered by Gemma 4.

A knowledge base that speaks up mid-meeting

The most distinctive feature is the knowledge base. You can upload documents to it in several formats:

  • PDFs
  • Google Docs
  • Microsoft Office files
  • Plain text and Markdown
  • Web bookmarks

The app combines these files with your meeting notes. It can then answer questions in real time when a topic linked to your stored material comes up in the conversation. In practice, the tool tries to bring up the relevant document while people are still talking about it, not afterwards.

Built for Apple Silicon, built for no signal

Google's FAQ page says Foresight is optimized for Apple Silicon and can run entirely offline. The practical benefit is simple. You can review and work with your meeting notes on a plane, while travelling, or anywhere without an internet connection.

Showcase or product?

Google's track record here is mixed. The April dictation app was an experiment and never reached mainstream use. TechCrunch's reading is that Foresight may also be mainly a showcase for what the Gemma family of offline models can do.

That is not the only possible path. TechCrunch also notes that Google could ship a consumer note-taker through its Gemini apps. That version would work across video calling apps and rely on Google's cloud models rather than local ones.

A crowded field

Meeting note-takers are a busy category, and new players keep arriving:

  • Wispr, a dictation company, released its own note-taker in recent months.
  • Calendly, the scheduling company, did the same.
  • Superhuman, formerly known as Grammarly, bought Fathom last month. Fathom is a note-taker backed by Y Combinator (YC), the US startup accelerator.

Our Take

Foresight is less interesting as a Granola clone than as a test of how much useful work a small model can do on a laptop. Transcription, summaries, chat and document retrieval all running locally is a real claim. If it holds up, it suggests the gap between cloud and on-device assistants is narrowing for everyday office tasks.

This also fits a wider pattern. Vendors increasingly offer AI that stays on the user's hardware, from self-hosted, air-gapped coding tools to offline dictation. Privacy and connectivity are part of the appeal. For people who record sensitive meetings, keeping everything on the device is a strong argument.

Three things are worth watching:

  • Survival: whether Foresight outlasts the April dictation app or stays a demo.
  • A Gemini version: whether Google turns the concept into a cloud-backed product inside Gemini, where tiered access to models already shapes what free users get.
  • Market pressure: with Wispr, Calendly and Superhuman all moving in, a free offline tool from Google could put pressure on paid note-takers. Its accuracy outside a controlled demo is still unproven.