Fathom is adding a botless encounter mode in an attempt to counter Granola

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

Fathoma startup building an AI-powered note-taking tool is trying to tackle this overcrowding problem with an update that allows its app to transcribe all the calls you’re in without requiring an AI assistant to sit in on them.

Now, this is nothing new. We already have several desktop apps like Granola, Talat, Notion and ChatGPT which can transcribe calls. Fathom says it’s trying to improve on those tools by allowing its app to record video, too, and its users can choose between different recording methods to transcribe calls.

The company said it focused on getting the speaker dating right to make it easier for users to recall the box.

“A lot of these bot-free tools don’t indicate who said what in their transcript,” Fathom CEO Richard White told TechCrunch after a call. For example, he said many people run into problems with misattribution when they ask the 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-free client for transcribing meetings, and this update was triggered by AI improvements over the past six months across various models.

Other updates include the ability to use artificial intelligence to query the meeting database, making it more useful for businesses, which can feed into a wider 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.

That last point recently prompted user complaints about 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 transcript data more accurate and give users more ways to record meetings. The company also plans to release an iOS app that can record in-person meetings.