I recently attended the AI Engineer conference, and there was a lot of new terminology I hadn’t heard before. Luckily, I have Retinue running on my laptop, and the definition quietly appeared. No interruption, no opening Claude and typing “what does X mean”, the talk kept going, and I could keep up.

My Retinue was paying off.

Retinue — /ˈrɛtɪnjuː/ a group of advisers accompanying an important person

Granola finishes the meeting. I want help during it.

Apps like Granola do a great job of transcribing meetings and spitting out follow-up notes, action items, summaries, and decisions. It’s useful, but all of that value lands after the meeting is over and everyone leaves.

What I have consistently wanted is for the answers to arrive during the call. When someone makes a claim that doesn’t sound right, verify it. When a question comes up, and no one in the room knows the answer, find out automatically. When someone says, “We’ll circle back next week once we’ve figured out X”, what if we didn’t need to? What if X could be figured out in the next ninety seconds, while the meeting is still live?

The real win is real-time research.

What the word actually means

I hadn’t come across the word Retinue before building this. It turns out to mean the group of advisors a royal or noble travelled with. Not a single chief of staff, an entourage. A merchant advisor who’d weigh in on the economics, a scholar who’d check the history, a priest who’d give the moral angle, a diplomat who’d read the politics. Each with their own lens, each whispering a different perspective as the king sat in a chamber making a decision.

Every monarch had one. Almost nobody else did.

That’s the experience I want to give myself (and you, of course). An always-on advisory council, each with its own speciality, quietly feeding you the information they’ve gone and gathered while you listen to whoever’s speaking. Technology has a habit of taking things that were once the preserve of a tiny elite: personal drivers, personal trainers, personal chefs, and making them available to anyone with a device. A retinue of advisors has been missing.

What Retinue actually does

It listens to the audio of whatever you’re in, whether a meeting, a talk, a podcast, or a one-on-one. It detects the moments worth acting on: an unfamiliar acronym, a factual claim that deserves checking, a question no one in the room can answer. And it dispatches agents to go and look those things up while the conversation carries on.

The results show up on the side of your screen. Not as interruptions, just as options. You glance when you want to; you ignore when you don’t.

The precursor was Critiq, a hackathon project I built last June in a phone booth at the Granola office. It was an iPhone app that detected logical contradictions in live audio. That was proof that the live-listening piece worked, and it got me an invite to the Unicorn Mafia crew. Retinue extends the idea from a single advisor (a logician) to an entire entourage.

So what

The retinue used to be the sign that you were a king. Now it’s a laptop and an API key. Not because it makes meetings shorter (it doesn’t), but because it stops the “we’ll circle back next week when we have the answer” moments from being the norm.