What Happens After You Record
The three stages between tapping Finish and getting your summary — and exactly when it's safe to close the app.
Tapping Finish doesn't hand you a summary instantly. Your Wave goes through three stages, and only the first one needs you to stick around. Knowing which stage you're in tells you whether to wait or get on with your day.
The three stages
Open a Wave that's still working and you'll see a progress bar for each stage:
Audio Upload — the recording moves from your phone to Wave. This is the only stage that needs the app open.
Audio Transcription — your audio becomes text. Partial transcript appears on the screen as it comes in, so you can start reading before the whole thing is done.
Generating Summary — Wave writes the summary, the title, and the action items.
YouTube imports skip the upload stage entirely — there's no file to send — and their third stage reads Processing Video instead.
When it's safe to close the app
The banner at the top of the processing screen tells you, in plain words, which side of the line you're on:
- "Please leave the app open while uploading." — the audio is still going up. Leaving now pauses the transfer.
- "It's safe to leave the app. You'll be notified when processing is complete." — the file is on Wave's servers. Transcription and summarizing happen there, so you can close Wave, lock the phone, or go offline.
When the summary is ready, Wave sends a push notification titled Your Wave is Ready with the session's new title. Tapping it opens that Wave.
On iPhone, the same progress shows up on your Lock Screen as a Live Activity — Processing, Transcribing, Summarizing, then the finished title. See background recording.
Watching from your library
You don't have to sit inside the Wave. In your list, a processing session shows a Status: line that updates as it moves along ("saving recording", "processing youtube video", "Your meeting recording is being processed...", and so on), the same safe-to-leave or keep-open advisory underneath, and the upload percentage on the right.
If you're offline when you finish, the row reads "Recording will process when connected to Internet." Nothing is lost — the audio is already written to your phone and goes up as soon as you have a connection.
If a Wave looks stuck
Work through these in order:
- Check your connection. A VPN or a captive Wi‑Fi network is the most common cause of an upload that never finishes. Turn the VPN off or switch networks.
- Tap the upload percentage on the row in your library. That asks Wave to pick the file up again.
- Look for the recovery banner. If Wave finds audio on your phone that never made it up, the Wave shows Recording Saved on Device — "Wave found audio that still needs to be recovered." Tap Recover and it uploads and processes normally.
- Open the Recovery Center. Go to Settings, then Help & Support, then File Recovery Info. Anything that failed to process automatically is listed there with a retry.
Automatic retries aren't unlimited — Wave stops after eight attempts on the same file, counted across app launches. If a recording is still stuck after that, use Chat with Support in Settings under Help & Support. The audio stays on your phone until it uploads successfully, so there's still something to rescue.
Full detail on all of that is in file recovery. If the recording was cut short by a call or another app taking the microphone, handling audio interruptions covers that case instead.
On the web
Recordings and imports made at app.wave.co follow the same path, and a session that's mid-processing shows Summary Processing — "Your summary is being generated and will appear here automatically." — where the summary will go. You can close the tab; the page fills itself in when you come back. Imported files show Upload Complete once the transfer is done, which is the web equivalent of the safe-to-leave line.
FAQ
Most recordings finish within a few minutes of the upload completing. Long recordings and video files take longer, and a busy phone on a slow connection spends most of that time on the upload stage.
Yes. Once the upload is done, processing is entirely on Wave's side and doesn't block a new recording.
You don't need to reprocess the whole Wave — rewrite the summary with Customize Summary, or edit the title and text directly. See editing summaries and transcripts.
If the audio had no discernible speech, there's nothing to summarize. Play it back first to check the microphone picked up what you expected.
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