Can I ask questions about a recording instead of reading the transcript?

Yes — and for anything over about twenty minutes it is the only sensible way to use a transcript. A two-hour meeting produces roughly 18,000 words; nobody re-reads that to find one number. The useful workflow is to transcribe once, then ask the transcript questions: what did we agree about the deadline, who raised the budget concern, what did she say the limit was. AI Transcribe has this built in on the phone — the transcript carries speaker labels and timestamps, and a chat runs against it.

What this actually is

It is retrieval over your own transcript, not a second listen. The model reads the text you produced and answers from it. That means:

• It can only know what was said. Anything inaudible, cut off, or outside the recording is not there — and a confident-sounding answer built on a garbled passage is the failure mode to watch for.
• Speaker labels change what you can ask. Without them, "who said that" is unanswerable. With them, attribution questions work.
• Timestamps make answers checkable. The point of a timestamp is that you can jump back and hear it yourself. Treat any answer that matters as a pointer to the audio, not a replacement for it.

The questions worth asking

Some shapes work far better than others:

• Extraction — "what dates were mentioned", "what did she quote as the price". Reliable, because the answer is in the text verbatim.
• Attribution — "who objected to the timeline". Works when speaker labels are clean.
• Summary by section — "summarise the last twenty minutes". Better than summarising the whole thing, which flattens everything into blandness.
• Action items — "what did I commit to". The single highest-value question after a meeting.

What works badly: anything asking for judgment the recording does not contain ("was she convinced?"), and anything requiring outside knowledge.

Doing it on an iPhone

1. Record in the app (up to two hours) or import an existing file (audio or video, up to three hours).
2. Wait for the transcript — speaker labels and timestamps are applied automatically, in any of 32 languages with automatic detection.
3. Ask. Alongside chat, the same transcript feeds one-tap summaries, key points, action items and email drafts.

Free trial, enough to try this on a real meeting before deciding; then Pro, weekly or yearly.

Where the alternatives sit

Meeting notetakers that join calls do this well for calls they attended, and not at all for the recording you already have on your phone. Desktop transcription services produce the transcript and generally leave the questioning to you. The phone-native combination — record or import, transcribe, then interrogate the text in the same place — is the part that removes the export step.

Frequently asked questions

Does it re-listen to the audio when I ask a question? No. It answers from the transcript. That is why transcript quality determines answer quality — a bad recording produces confident, wrong answers.

Can I ask about a recording in another language? Yes. Transcription covers 32 languages with automatic detection, and the transcript can be translated into 46 languages if you do not read the original.

Is this the same as a summary? No, and both are useful. A summary is what the recording was about; questions are how you get the one detail you actually need without reading the rest.

Does this work offline? No. Both transcription and the chat run in the cloud — see does transcription work offline.