Fathom adds a bot-less meeting mode in a bid to take on Granola

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

Fathom, a startup that makes an AI note-taking tool, is trying to address that overcrowding issue with an update that enables its app to transcribe all calls you attend without requiring an AI assistant to join them.

Now, this isn’t anything new. We already have several desktop apps like like Granola, Talat, Notion and ChatGPT that can transcribe calls. Fathom says it is trying to improve on those tools by enabling its app to record videos, too, and its users can choose between various recording modes for transcribing calls.

The company said it focused on getting speaker diarization right to make it easier for users to recall context.

“A lot of these bot-less tools don’t indicate who said what in their captured transcript,” Fathom’s CEO Richard White told TechCrunch over a call. As an example, he said many people face problems with misattribution when they ask their meeting note-taker a question about what they might have said in a particular meeting a few months ago.

White said Fathom has always wanted to release a bot-less client for transcribing meetings, and this update was enabled by AI improvements in the last six months across various models.

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

This last point recently sparked user complaints for Granola after it made changes to its on-device database and broke AI workflows that used transcript data from that source.

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