The five ways in
- Voice — record a note. The audio is stored as the original record.
- Scan — photograph a form, a page or a whiteboard.
- File — attach a PDF or document.
- Note — type or paste text. The fastest, and the most used.
- Shared content — forwarded email and shared text.
Transcription and OCR: the current limitation
This is the most important thing to know about capture today. Voice notes and scans store the real audio or image, but the automatic step that reads them — speech-to-text and OCR — is not finished yet.
Until it ships, a voice or scan capture asks you to type the gist so the extraction has something to work with. The original stays attached either way. There is deliberately no fake transcription that pretends to have listened.
See the roadmap for where this sits.
What happens after you capture
Every capture takes the same path: the original is stored, the text is read, the capture is classified, entities (people, dates, projects) are extracted, obligations are identified, each one is scored for confidence, and the result is proposed to you.
Captures have visible states — pending, processing, processed or failed — so you can always tell what Zephyr has and hasn't got to yet. A failed capture keeps its original and can be retried.
Getting better extractions
- Say the deadline. "Before Friday" extracts cleanly; "soon" cannot, because the information isn't there.
- Use names. "Ask John to confirm staffing" links the action to a person. "Ask him" doesn't.
- Don't pre-summarise. Paste the original message rather than your compression of it.
- Multiple obligations are fine. Two asks in one sentence should produce two actions.
Capturing without a connection
A quick note taken offline is stored on the device and syncs when you're back online. AI processing needs a connection, because all AI calls are routed through Zephyr's backend rather than running on your phone — so an offline capture will sit as pending until it can be processed.
Deleting a capture
Deleting a capture removes the stored original file as well as the record, not just the reference to it. Actions that were already created and approved from that capture are separate records and are not deleted with it.