Stop scrolling for promises. AI extracts action items, owners, and deadlines from any WhatsApp conversation including voice notes.
Jan 31, 20267 min read
Someone in your WhatsApp chat said "I'll handle it by Friday." Three weeks later, nobody remembers who said it or what "it" was.
Action items in WhatsApp chats are informal. People commit to things mid-conversation, between jokes and links and voice notes. Extracting those commitments manually means scrolling through hundreds of messages trying to spot promises.
AI can do this in seconds.
What counts as an action item
An action item in a WhatsApp chat is any message where someone commits to doing something:
"I'll send the proposal tomorrow"
"Can you check with finance?"
"Let me handle the booking"
"We need to update the deck before Thursday"
These are easy to miss because they are not formatted as tasks. They are buried in natural conversation.
How to extract action items automatically
Export the WhatsApp chat as a .zip from your phone.
Get a structured list of tasks with owners and deadlines.
ThreadRecap scans every message (including transcribed voice notes) and extracts commitments, assigns owners based on who said what, and flags any deadlines mentioned.
What the output looks like
A typical action items extraction includes:
Task description - What needs to be done
Owner - Who committed to it (inferred from context)
Deadline - If mentioned ("by Friday", "next week", "before the meeting")
Status - Open, implied done, or unclear
Source - Where in the conversation the commitment was made
This is ready to paste into your task manager, email, or project tool.
Owner detection
ThreadRecap infers owners from conversational context:
"I'll do it" - Owner is the sender
"Can you handle this?" followed by "Sure" - Owner is the responder
"Sarah needs to send the invoice" - Owner is Sarah
Voice note: "Yeah I'll take care of the design review" - Owner is the speaker
This works even when people do not explicitly assign tasks.
Deadline detection
Deadlines in WhatsApp are informal:
"by Friday" - Maps to the next Friday
"before the meeting" - Flagged as relative deadline
"tomorrow" - Maps to the day after the message
"end of month" - Flagged with date range
No deadline mentioned - Marked as "no deadline specified"
Group chats vs 1:1 chats
In 1:1 chats, action items are straightforward. One person asks, the other agrees.
In group chats, things get messy. Multiple people commit to different things, some tasks are directed at specific people, and some are vague ("someone should look into this").
For group chats, ThreadRecap lets you select specific participants to focus on. This filters out noise and makes the action items list cleaner.
Voice notes contain action items too
People often commit to things in voice messages:
"Hey, just a quick one - I'll send you the contract tonight, and can you review it before our call tomorrow?"
That is two action items in one voice note. Without transcription, they are invisible.
ThreadRecap transcribes all voice notes and includes them in the action item scan.
Use cases
After a project planning chat - Get a task list with owners
Weekly team updates - Extract commitments from the group thread
Client conversations - Document what was promised and by whom
Personal reminders - Find things you said you would do
Accountability - Share the action items list so everyone knows their tasks
From chat to task list in 60 seconds
Export your chat, upload it, pick the action items goal. You get a clean list that is ready to copy into Asana, Jira, Notion, or an email.
