Extract action items from WhatsApp work thread | ThreadRecap
Work decisions live in WhatsApp. Deadlines get agreed in passing, ownership is assumed rather than stated, and the thread moves on before anyone writes anything down. By the time a project slips, the commitment is buried under dozens of follow-up messages and a handful of voice notes nobody re-listened to. ThreadRecap's WhatsApp action items feature is built specifically for this problem: it reads the full export, surfaces every task, names the owner, and attaches a date.
Why WhatsApp work threads hide most of the action items
WhatsApp was designed for conversation, not project tracking. That design choice has three practical consequences for teams that use it as a de-facto work tool.
First, commitments are spread across message types. A typed message might say "I'll send the revised brief tonight," while a voice note from the same thread contains "yeah, @Carlos, can you book the venue before the end of the week?" Both are action items. Neither is flagged as one.
Second, ownership is often implied rather than explicit. "Someone needs to chase the supplier" reads as a task, but no name is attached. The model has to infer ownership from context: who was being addressed, who responded affirmatively, whose name appeared in the sentence immediately before.
Third, group threads accumulate fast. A busy project group can generate hundreds of messages in a single day. Scrolling back through that volume to compile a task list is slow, error-prone, and something most people simply do not do.
The result is a reliable pattern: tasks agreed on WhatsApp either get duplicated manually into a project tool (with effort and delay) or they get missed entirely.
Three scenarios where this matters most
Engineering standup threads
Many engineering teams run async standups over WhatsApp, especially in distributed or timezone-spread organisations. A typical morning thread includes blockers, handoffs, and small commitments: "I'll open the PR by noon," "let me know when the staging env is back up and I'll deploy," "tagging @Priya to review the auth changes."
A single standup thread for a five-person team can contain eight to twelve discrete action items. Extracted and pushed to a Trello board or Notion database, those items become trackable cards with owners and due dates. Left in the thread, they disappear into the next day's standup.
Sales handoff conversations
Sales-to-CS handoffs conducted over WhatsApp are particularly prone to lost commitments. The AE is wrapping up, the CSM is onboarding, and both are juggling other threads. Typical commitments in a handoff thread include: who sends the welcome email, who schedules the kick-off call, who shares the contract summary, and by when.
These are time-sensitive. A missed handoff action item in the first week of a new customer relationship has an outsized cost. ThreadRecap extracts the full list, with the sender's name and any stated deadline, so neither party has to reconstruct it from memory.
Client onboarding groups
Client-facing WhatsApp groups often include a mix of internal team members and client contacts. Commitments flow in both directions: "we'll have the integration spec to you by Thursday," "can you send us the API credentials this afternoon?" Keeping track of what your side has promised, and what the client has agreed to provide, is genuinely difficult without a structured log.
ThreadRecap reads the full group export, attributes each task to the correct party, and produces a clean action item list that can be reviewed before the next check-in call. For onboarding threads that run over several weeks, this is also a useful audit trail. See how to build a decision log from a WhatsApp thread for a complementary approach to capturing commitments alongside formal decisions.
How owner detection works
Every message in a WhatsApp export is prefixed with a timestamp and a display name. That name is the first ownership signal. If a message reads "Marcus: I'll handle the invoicing by Wednesday," the system attributes the action item to Marcus without ambiguity.
The second signal is @mentions. When someone writes "@Sofia can you confirm the budget?" the mention is a direct assignment. ThreadRecap reads that as Sofia being the owner of the budget confirmation task, even though the message was sent by someone else.
The third signal is voice note speaker attribution. Voice notes are transcribed using OpenAI Whisper before the action item extraction runs. The transcript is tied to the sender of the voice note, so a spoken commitment is attributed the same way a typed one would be. Whisper achieves 2.7% WER on LibriSpeech and 8-12% on real-world audio, which means the vast majority of spoken commitments are captured correctly. On noisier recordings, the transcript is flagged with a lower-confidence indicator so you can review it manually.
Where ownership cannot be determined with confidence, ThreadRecap marks the item as unassigned rather than guessing. You can assign it manually before pushing to your task tool.
Deadline extraction: explicit dates and implied ones
Deadline language in WhatsApp threads falls into two broad categories, and ThreadRecap handles both.
Explicit dates
Phrases like "by 5 pm on the 14th," "before the board meeting on March 3rd," or "no later than next Tuesday" are resolved directly to a calendar date. The message timestamp provides the year and timezone context needed to anchor relative references like "next Tuesday" correctly.
Implied deadlines
Implied deadlines are more common and more varied. Common patterns include:
Sprint-relative: "end of sprint," "before the retro," "in this cycle"
Event-relative: "before the client call," "ahead of the launch," "once the PR is merged"
For sprint-relative and event-relative expressions, ThreadRecap uses the surrounding context to infer the date where possible. If a sprint end date was mentioned earlier in the thread, that anchor is used. If the event has not been defined in the thread, the item is flagged as needing a manual date rather than assigned an arbitrary one.
This matters for downstream tools. A Google Calendar event or a Trello card with a due date is actionable. A task with no date is easy to ignore.
Exporting to Notion, Trello, or Google Calendar
Once ThreadRecap has extracted the action items, each one carries three fields: task description, owner, and deadline (or an "unresolved" flag). From the dashboard, you can push the full list to your tool of choice in a single step.
Notion
Action items are written to a Notion database as individual pages. Each page includes the task title, the assigned owner as a text property, the deadline as a date property, and a link back to the source message timestamp. Teams that already use Notion for project tracking can drop the extracted tasks directly into an existing database by mapping the fields during the first setup.
Trello
Each action item becomes a Trello card in the board and list you specify. The owner is added as a card member if their Trello account is connected, and the deadline populates the card's due date field. Cards created from WhatsApp threads carry a label so they are visually distinct from manually created cards.
Google Calendar
Deadline-bearing action items can be pushed as Google Calendar events. The event title is the task description, the date is the extracted deadline, and the description field contains the owner's name and the original message text. This works well for time-sensitive commitments where a calendar reminder is more useful than a task card.
CSV export
For teams using a different tool, or for compliance and legal purposes, the full action item list exports as a CSV with columns for task, owner, deadline, message timestamp, and sender display name. This format is compatible with most project management and spreadsheet tools and is suitable for inclusion in evidence packages. For more on structuring WhatsApp output for formal use, see the guide on generating meeting minutes from a WhatsApp chat.
Privacy and data handling
The export-and-upload workflow means you control the file before anything is processed. You export the chat from WhatsApp to your device, then upload it to ThreadRecap. Photos, videos, and documents attached to the chat never leave your device. Only the chat text and any voice note audio files are transmitted and stored. That data is encrypted in your account, and you can delete it at any time from the dashboard.
This is relevant for work threads that contain commercially sensitive information. The processing happens on your terms, on your timeline, and the data does not persist beyond what you choose to keep.
The core problem with using WhatsApp as a work tool is not the conversations themselves. It is the gap between what gets agreed in a thread and what actually gets tracked. Structured extraction closes that gap: every commitment, every owner, every deadline, pulled into the tools your team already uses to manage work.
