Granola missed two of my three calls, so I built my own
I love Granola. I’ve been using it for several years now for pretty much every call that happens on my computer, and once you get used to having transcripts of your calls, you realize how valuable they are. I was missing them on the calls I take on my phone. Granola’s iPhone app was initially just for in-person conversations, so when they added transcripts for outgoing phone calls, I was excited to give it a try.
The idea is great, but the execution has left me a little skeptical. I made three calls this week and only one of the transcripts came through. The other two said the upload failed, and these were both important calls where I was relying on the transcripts. That was enough to get me to check whether there was any way to get them back, and then to ask how hard it would be to build this for myself.
My lesson
In the age of AI, you can do almost anything. You just have to be curious enough to ask.
So, I opened up Claude Code and described what I wanted, which was a way to make a call from my iPhone and have the transcript show up in my Obsidian notes where I already keep everything else. One of the first things I learned is that Apple doesn’t let apps listen in on phone calls, so the call has to go through a second phone number that does the recording, while the person I’m calling still sees my regular cell number. To start a call, I added an iPhone Shortcut to my home screen and gave it a little phone icon. When I tap it, it asks who I’m calling and kicks off the whole process.
By the afternoon I was ready to make my first test call, to my wife. She didn’t pick up, so the first transcript in my notes is twelve seconds of her voicemail greeting, but it worked! She answered the second one, and a few minutes after we hung up the whole conversation was sitting in my notes with each of us labeled.
I’ll still be using Granola for any calls that happen on my computer, but going forward, I’m happy to know that I have a working system for the phone calls I actually need to make on my phone.
How it works
- I tap the phone icon on my home screen and pick who to call, from a calendar event happening now, my contacts, or a typed-in number.
- The call goes through a rented phone number that connects us, and the other person still sees my normal cell number.
- Each side is recorded on its own track, so the transcript always knows who said what.
- A few minutes after I hang up, the transcript lands in Obsidian with a link to the recording.
What it’s built with:
- Telnyx for the phone number and the recording, at $1 a month plus about a cent and a half per minute
- Deepgram for the transcription
- Railway to host the small server that ties it together, for about $1 a month
- An iPhone Shortcut on my home screen to start the call
- Obsidian, which isn’t technically part of the build, but you need a note taker like it for the transcripts to land in, and it’s the tool I’ve found to be best for things like this
- Claude Code, which wrote all of it
The iPhone side is all inside that one Shortcut. Claude Code generated it as a file that I opened on my Mac and it synced over to my phone, so I never had to drag any of the steps into place myself. Here’s a quick scroll through it:
A couple of things worth knowing if you’re thinking about building something like this:
- California requires everyone on a call to agree to being recorded. Nothing announces it automatically, so I ask at the start of the call.
- A thirty minute call costs around 70 cents. There’s no automatic summary, since Claude can already read the transcripts in my notes whenever I want one.
I’m still a little amazed at how quickly you can solve your own niche problems now.
Try it yourself
Everything you need to set up your own version is on GitHub, including the server, the iPhone Shortcut and the sync into Obsidian. If you’re interested in trying this out, you can request access here. Just include your GitHub username and I’ll add you.