Asking questions about a meeting you recorded

After a meeting is recorded, you can ask questions about it in plain words — what was decided, who took which task, what was said about the budget. In Dalm the questions go in the Ask tab of a meeting. The answer comes from that meeting’s transcript and the notes you typed, and when the recording holds no answer, it says so. The speech is recognised on your Mac and the audio is never sent anywhere; the transcript is synced to our servers, and to answer, the text is sent to a third-party language model. There is a Free plan, and it is not a trial.

What you can ask, and where the answer comes from

The Ask tab belongs to one meeting, and the field says so: “A question about this meeting”. The app’s own advice is “Ask the way you would ask someone who was at the meeting.” — plain words, no special syntax. Under the heading it says where answers come from: “Answers come from what was said at this meeting”. The answer is built from the meeting’s transcript and the notes you typed, and when it quotes the transcript word for word, that quote opens the transcript at the place it was said.

You do not have to think of the first question yourself: the model reads the conversation and offers a few questions drawn from it. A meeting can hold several separate conversations — start a “New chat” for a different line of questioning, rename one or delete it.

Before a meeting is recorded there is nothing to ask. As the app puts it, “The review, the questions and the reports are written from what was said.”

What it cannot answer

• Other meetings. A question is asked about one meeting, and the answer comes from that meeting alone. Across meetings the app keeps two lists instead — “Tasks” and “Decisions”, gathered on the server from your meetings — and search looks through meetings and dictations at once. Asking one question of all your meetings is in development.
• What nobody said. If the recording holds no answer, the assistant tells you that rather than filling the gap.
• How it sounded. The model receives text, not sound: the audio is never sent anywhere, so tone of voice and pauses are not part of what it reads.
• The start of a long conversation. In a long chat the earliest questions stop counting, and the app shows it: “Earlier questions are no longer taken into account”. A new chat starts clean.
• Anything, without a connection. “Answering needs the internet. Everything you recorded opens as usual.” Recording and transcription carry on without it.

What no note-taking tool can do — stand in for you at the meeting — is a different limit, covered in why a record of a meeting is not the same as being there.

The summary written before you ask

Most of what people ask after a meeting is the same every time: what was decided, who does what, by when. Those answers are already there when you open the meeting — the summary is written from the synced transcript by a third-party language model, and each point keeps the words behind it. Nothing in it is filled in that was not said: a task nobody took reads “Owner not stated”. The Ask tab is for everything else.

Each point of the summary rests on a quote in the speaker’s own words. Every quote shows you where it was said — open it and the transcript opens at that place. What opens is text; there is no player for the recording. The summary itself is described on what the summary is made of, point by point.

Where the text goes when you ask

Speech recognition happens on your Mac, and the audio is never sent anywhere. The transcript is synced to our servers automatically — there is no switch for that — and a question is answered from there. When you ask, a third-party language model receives the meeting’s transcript with every line and who said it, your notes, the names you gave the voices, the earlier questions and answers in that chat, and the question itself. The audio is not part of it, in this or in any other request. The conversation is synced with the meeting, so it is there on every Mac you sign in to.

Free, Pro or Team: what to try first

The Ask tab comes with the Free plan, and Free is a plan rather than a trial: it does not run out. You need a Mac with Apple Silicon · macOS 15.0 or later and an account — the app will not open without one — and while the app is not public, the way in is the waitlist. What the paid plans add, and what they cost, is on the plans and prices page. When a group records into one shared space, every member sees its meetings by default, and a meeting set to elevated or protected privacy is seen by fewer people; how that works. The dictionary, templates and tags are shared, and the questions and answers in a meeting’s Ask tab are seen by its author and the colleagues invited to it — how a team is set up. For what Free covers task by task, see the free tasks page.