Action Items in Wave
Wave pulls the follow-ups out of every conversation and keeps them in one checklist you can work through.
Every Wave session can carry a checklist of action items — the concrete follow-ups that came out of the conversation. Wave extracts them from the recording automatically, and you can check them off, reword them, add your own, or delete the ones that don't matter.
Where action items live
There are two views: the checklist on a single session, and one list that pulls together open items from every session.
One session — open it and switch to the Action Items tab, next to Summary and Transcript.
Everything at once — tap the checkmark icon in the header of the Home tab. That opens Action Items, which shows a count like 12 open across 4 sessions.
Everything syncs across your devices. If you don't see the cross-session view yet, update to the latest version of the app.
How Wave creates them
When a recording finishes processing, Wave reads the transcript and pulls out the genuine follow-ups — things someone committed to, was asked to do, or that landed as a clear next step. General discussion stays in the summary.
Two rules decide whether Wave generates anything:
- The recording has to be longer than 5 minutes.
- The session has to be a conversation. Wave skips imported files, YouTube videos, and podcasts.
If a session genuinely has no follow-ups, the list stays empty. Wave won't invent tasks.
What's in an item
Beyond the task itself, Wave fills in what it can:
- Owner — when it's clear who's responsible, the name shows as @Name. Naming your speakers, or letting Voice ID do it, makes this much more accurate.
- Due date — a deadline mentioned out loud ("by Friday") is resolved to a real date and shown under the item.
- Timestamp — tap the time chip to jump the audio player to the moment the item came from.
Working the list
On a session's Action Items tab:
- Check one off — tap the checkbox. It gets crossed out, and the header count updates (3 of 5 remaining).
- Reword it — tap the text and type. Changes save on their own.
- Add your own — type in Add an action item… and tap the + button on mobile, or Add on web and desktop.
- Delete one — tap the trash icon on the row.
On the cross-session Action Items view:
- Switch between Open, Completed, and All.
- Items are grouped by session, each with an open-count badge. Tap a session heading to open that recording.
- Complete all clears a whole session's group in one tap. On web, a toast offers Undo.
- Delete items you don't want. On mobile you'll be asked to confirm (Delete action item?).
Adding your own item to a session tells Wave to stop regenerating that session's list — so a reprocess won't wipe out what you wrote. Editing the wording of an item Wave produced doesn't lock the list; that item can still be replaced if the session is reprocessed. Add one manual item if you want a session's list frozen.
Letting an AI assistant read and write them
If you've connected Wave to Claude, ChatGPT, or another MCP client, your assistant can pull your action items and write them back — "turn yesterday's product review into action items and save them to the session", or "mark the contract task as done".
Writes are deliberately narrow: an assistant can update a session's action items and file sessions into folders, but it can't delete sessions or change recordings and transcripts. Items an assistant writes are tagged as agent-written, so they behave like Wave-generated items rather than your own. There's a ceiling of 200 items per session and 2,000 characters per item.
If you edit the same session in the app while your assistant is mid-update, the write is rejected rather than overwriting you — the assistant just needs to re-read and try again.
See connecting Wave to other AI tools for setup, or the Wave Developer API to do the same thing from your own code.
Tips
- Short recording with nothing detected? The list still works as a plain manual checklist.
- The cross-session view is the fastest way to answer "what do I owe people this week" without opening a single session.
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