How to Chat With Your Recordings on Your Mac Without Uploading Audio

You finish a 90-minute meeting. The transcript is sitting in front of you. The AI summary covered the headlines - key topics, action items, overall theme - but you have a more specific question. What exactly did James commit to? What did the engineering team say about the SSO migration? Can someone draft me a follow-up email for the client?

Scrolling through the transcript to answer those by hand is the part that always slows people down. With AI Chat in Silkwave Voice, you ask the question instead. A chat panel opens beside the transcript, the assistant already has the full text as context, and you get an answer in a few seconds - all without uploading your audio anywhere.

Open Any Recording and Start Asking

Open a recording in Silkwave Voice and click the AI Chat button in the top-right of the toolbar, next to the Transcription and Summary tabs. A chat panel slides out beside the transcript.

Type a question, press Enter, and the assistant responds using the recording's transcript as its working context. There is nothing to upload, no document to point it at, no separate "ingest" step. The transcript is already there.

What You Can Actually Ask

The most valuable prompts tend to fall into a few categories. Some real examples:

Pull out specific commitments and decisions. Most of the time after a meeting, you don't need a summary - you need one piece of information.

• "What did James commit to by end of week?"
• "What was the decision about the SSO integration?"
• "Did anyone push back on the proposed Q3 timeline?"

Draft follow-up communication. Turn the conversation into something you can send.

• "Draft a Slack message summarizing the action items for the engineering channel."
• "Write a follow-up email to the client recapping next steps and owners."
• "Give me three bullet points I can paste into the project tracker."

Rewrite or reformat sections. Useful when you want a polished version of something that was said off the cuff.

• "Rewrite the closing remarks in a more formal tone."
• "Turn my answer to the second question into a short blurb for the website."

Clarify what was said. Long transcripts are dense, and a single line can be easy to miss.

• "What did the engineer mean by 'the migration is blocked'?"
• "Summarize what the second speaker argued, in plain English."

The same workflow applies outside of meetings. Students reviewing a lecture can ask the assistant to explain a concept the professor brushed past. Journalists working through an interview can ask for every quote where the subject mentioned a specific topic. Podcasters can ask for show notes, episode descriptions, or pull-quotes for social posts.

How It's Different From "Chat With Your Transcript" SaaS Tools

A lot of cloud products will happily let you chat with a meeting transcript. The catch is how they get the transcript in the first place: they send a bot to record your call, upload your audio to their servers, transcribe it there, and store both the audio and the transcript indefinitely. The "chat" part is the last step in a pipeline that's already moved your audio off your machine.

Silkwave Voice flips the order. Recording and transcription happen entirely on your Mac using Apple's on-device speech-to-text models - no bot in the call, no audio leaving your device. See our earlier write-up on recording meetings without a bot for how that part works.

When you then chat with the transcript, only the transcript text and your typed message are shared with ChatGPT through Apple Intelligence's ChatGPT extension. Your original audio is never uploaded. The first time it shares transcript text, macOS asks you to confirm.

There are no API keys to configure, no monthly subscription, and no per-message pricing. The cost is the one-time purchase of the app. For the longer version of the on-device vs cloud argument, see on-device vs cloud transcription.

Conversation History Is Saved Per Recording

You don't need to start over every time you come back to a meeting. Chat history is stored separately for each recording, locally on your Mac. Open a recording from last week, and the conversation you had with it last week is still there.

If you want a clean slate for a specific recording, click the eraser icon in the chat panel header and confirm. That clears only the chat for that recording - everything else stays.

Setup Is the Same as AI Summarization

AI Chat shares its integration with AI Summarization, so if you already set that up, AI Chat works immediately. If you haven't, it is a one-time checklist in Settings > AI Integration Shortcut:

1. Enable Apple Intelligence on your Mac.
2. Enable the ChatGPT extension in Apple Intelligence settings.
3. Grant Silkwave Voice the Shortcuts Events permission.
4. Install the bundled Silkwave Voice AI Shortcut.

The full walkthrough is in the AI Chat documentation.

A Few Honest Caveats

• The LLM lives in the cloud. Transcription happens on your Mac, but the chat response itself comes from ChatGPT through Apple Intelligence. This is the part of the pipeline that needs an internet connection. What stays local is your audio.
• AI can be wrong. The assistant is grounded in the transcript, which helps a lot, but it can still misread context or get a fact subtly wrong. For important details, double-check the transcript.
• One recording at a time. AI Chat is scoped to the recording you have open. It does not search across your whole library.

Get Started

Silkwave Voice is on the Mac App Store with a 7-day free trial - one-time purchase, no subscription, no bot in your meetings.

Download Silkwave Voice from the Mac App Store