Ask your meetings

Every meeting note in Steno has an inline ask bar. Type a question in plain English and Steno answers from the saved transcript, summary, and key topics using the local language model.

​

How to use it

1. Open a saved note from the sidebar
2. Click the Ask bar at the bottom of the pane
3. Type your question and press Return

Steno reads the saved .md files for that meeting — the summary, key topics, and full transcript — and passes them with your question to the local model. The answer streams inline below the ask bar.

​

What you can ask

The ask bar is useful for questions you would ask a colleague who was in the meeting:

• “What decisions were made?”
• “What did we agree to do about the pricing change?”
• “Who is responsible for the API migration?”
• “Summarize this in three bullet points.”
• “What were the concerns raised about the timeline?”
• “Was there anything about [client name]?”

Questions that reference specific details from the meeting work best. Vague questions (“what happened?”) return less useful answers than specific ones (“what was the outcome of the budget discussion?”).

​

What Steno reads

When you ask a question, Steno reads three sources from the saved note: The full transcript is included when it fits within the model’s context window. For long meetings, Steno trims the transcript intelligently, keeping the most relevant sections.

​

Privacy

All queries are processed by the local model on your Mac. Your questions and the meeting content are not sent to any external server unless you have configured a cloud model in Settings.

---

Can I ask questions across multiple meetings?

Not yet. The ask bar currently works against a single meeting’s saved note. Cross-meeting search is on the roadmap.

The answers are not very accurate -- what should I try?

Larger models produce better answers. In Settings → Models → Summarization, switch to qwen3.5:9b or deepseek-r1:14b. Also check that the full transcript was saved — if transcription failed or was skipped, the model only has the summary to work from.

Can I ask in a language other than English?

Yes. The ask bar passes your question directly to the language model, which supports multilingual input. Results may vary by model and language.