How to Search Meeting Transcripts on Mac by Asking Questions

To search past meeting transcripts without remembering which meeting it was, ask a plain question in Ask, inside Rebrief for Mac, such as "Why did we leave reporting out of the first release?" Ask searches your recorded meetings on your Mac, writes a short answer and shows the lines it came from. Click a line and the meeting opens at that moment, so you can check what was actually said. It only finds meetings you recorded with Rebrief.

This is for the moment you remember discussing the launch deadline but not which call it was, or exactly what everyone agreed.

How to search meeting transcripts by asking a question

1. Open Ask in Rebrief.
2. Ask about the one thing holding up your work, using the project name and the detail you remember.
3. Read the answer, then open the source lines under it.
4. Read the exchange around those lines before you use the answer.
5. If the answer is about the wrong meeting or release, say so in a follow-up question.

You don't need to know the meeting title or date. Start from the gap in the ticket, project update or reply you're writing. A focused question works better than "tell me everything about the project", which tends to give you another summary when you only need the reason behind one choice.

Example questions to find what was said in a meeting

• "What launch date did we discuss for the customer portal?"
• "Who agreed to check the export requirements?"
• "Why did we leave reporting out of the first release?"
• "What did the engineering lead say about that in last week's review?"
• "Did we discuss a different plan for reporting after that meeting?"

Ask about a topic, a date or a person's commitment. Add a person or a time period when several conversations sound alike, and use full names when two people share a first name.

Check the answer against the transcript

Ask places the source lines under each answer. For the reporting question, look at whether people agreed to defer the feature, only suggested it, or made it depend on another discussion. Those differences change what you write in the ticket. If the passage shows only a suggestion, you still have a decision to confirm.

Check each detail you plan to use. A passage may explain why work was deferred without naming who owns the follow-up. If the answer includes an owner or a deadline, open the source for that detail too. When the words or the speaker look wrong, listen to the recording before you assign work.

How to refine a question when the answer is wrong

Ask supports follow-up questions, so you can correct it without starting over: "I mean the first customer release, before we added the reporting work." A follow-up like "And what about last week?" keeps the topic and changes the dates.

When a later meeting may have changed the answer, ask about it before relying on an older agreement. Check the dates on the sources. An earlier commitment explains the history, but it may not be the plan to follow today. If you need a running record of which decision applies now, keep a decision log; see how to track decisions across recurring meetings.

Put the checked answer where it's needed

Once you've checked the reason for a choice, add it to the ticket or project note in your own words, with the meeting name and date. If you quote someone, use the transcript wording you checked, not the generated answer.

Keep any condition with it. If a release date depended on customer approval, write the dependency beside the date. If nobody accepted the follow-up, leave the owner open instead of assigning the person who happened to raise it.

Ask tells you what was said, not what happened afterward. To know whether someone sent a file or shipped a change, check the delivery record, the ticket or the person's own update.

When the search finds nothing

First check that Rebrief has the conversation. If it happened in a call you didn't record or in a chat thread, look there. If the recording is there, try the words people used at the time, such as "customer report" instead of the feature's newer name, or widen the time period in your question.

For a recent meeting, wait for transcription to finish after recording. It runs on your Mac after the call, not live. The support page covers setup.

Asking across meetings with a larger model

Ask uses a small model on your Mac, so it works offline once its models have downloaded. For questions that need more reasoning across many meetings, you can connect Claude or another MCP client to your meeting transcripts through Rebrief's local, read-only MCP server. If that assistant uses a cloud model, the text it reads may go to its provider.

Building a meeting history worth searching

Ask can only search what you recorded. Ask for permission before recording and follow your organization's rules; tell people you're recording, as recording laws differ by place. Rebrief needs an Apple Silicon Mac with macOS 15 or later. Free recordings stop at 15 minutes, and a one-time purchase removes that limit. With a few meetings recorded, ask the one question holding up your work and follow its sources before you use the answer.