How it works

How to export and analyse a WhatsApp chat

Chat Forensics turns a WhatsApp chat export into a structured AI report on sentiment, key topics, communication patterns and risks. Here is what happens at every step: how to get the export out of WhatsApp, what you can upload, how the price is worked out, what the AI actually sees, and what the finished report does and does not tell you.

Step 1: Export the chat from WhatsApp

WhatsApp has a built-in export that writes the conversation out as a plain-text transcript, with the media files attached if you ask for them. You do this in WhatsApp itself: Chat Forensics never connects to your account and never sees your phone. The steps below follow WhatsApp's own help page. How to export your chat history (WhatsApp Help Centre)

On iPhone

Open the individual or group chat.
Tap your contact's name or the group name at the top of the screen.
Tap Export chat.
If the chat contains media, choose Attach Media or Without Media.
Choose Save to Files.
WhatsApp exports an iPhone chat as a ZIP file. Upload the ZIP from the Files app as it is: there is no need to unzip it.

On Android

Open the individual or group chat.
Tap More options (the three dots at the top right), then More, then Export chat.
Choose Without media or Include media.
Choose how to send it to yourself, for example email or your own notes app.
Android gives you a .txt file, or a ZIP file when you include media. Upload whichever you have, without unzipping it.

Which export should I choose?

Without media is smaller and quicker, and it still keeps a placeholder line for every photo, video and voice note, so the conversation reads in the right order. Include media (Attach Media on iPhone) gives you a ZIP file with the files themselves: upload the ZIP and tick the voice notes and images you want transcribed and described. The chat on its own already produces a full report; media is optional and priced separately.

An export is a text file, not a backup, so it cannot be imported back into WhatsApp.
View once messages are not exported by WhatsApp, and deleted messages appear only as a "This message was deleted" placeholder.
When you include media, WhatsApp attaches the most recent media from the chat rather than all of it, so check that you have the files you actually want analysed.

Step 2: Upload the chat and any media

Sign in, open the upload page and drop in the .txt or ZIP file. Choosing the voice notes and images you want analysed is optional, and you can limit the analysis to a date range if you only care about part of the conversation. Go to the upload page

The chat file: The export as your app makes it: a WhatsApp .txt or ZIP, a Messenger or Instagram JSON download, a Telegram Desktop JSON export or an SMS Backup & Restore .xml (a ZIP can be up to 2 GB). The chat text can be up to 10 MB.
Media files: As many as you like, each priced in your quote: voice notes and images up to 25 MB each, videos up to 14.3 MB, and 2 GB in total per chat. Tick them in the ZIP, or attach them next to a .txt. Images can be JPEG, PNG, GIF or WebP; voice notes can be OGG, MP3, M4A, WAV or WebM.
Checked on the server: Every file is identified from its own bytes and each voice note's length is measured from the file, so the price is never based on what a browser claims.
Encrypted on arrival: The chat and its media are briefly written to the server while they are received, then encrypted, and the readable copy is deleted, normally within seconds.
Your confirmation: Before the upload starts you confirm: "I was part of this conversation, I'm 18 or over, and everyone in it is an adult".

A short free preview runs automatically as soon as the upload finishes, so you can see that the chat parsed correctly and get a feel for the output before deciding whether to buy the full report.

Step 3: Check your quote, then pay

Pricing is per report, and the price depends on the size of the chat and the media you attach. Your quote is worked out from the upload the server measured, itemised line by line, and locked to your order for 24 hours. Nothing is analysed and nothing is charged until you accept it. See the current prices

Packages: One price per chat, for the package that covers it. Basic is $6.99 / £4.99: a relationship report on a chat of up to 500 messages, text only. Essential is $14.99 / £14.99: one report of your choice on a chat of up to 2,500 messages, including up to 3 media files and 2 minutes of audio or video, and 2 Ask AI questions. Extended is $29.99 / £29.99: one report of your choice on a chat of up to 5,000 messages, including up to 8 media files and 8 minutes of audio or video, and 4 Ask AI questions. Complete is $44.99 / £44.99: one report of your choice on a chat of up to 8,300 messages, including up to 15 media files and 15 minutes of audio or video, and 8 Ask AI questions.
Bigger chats: Large chat: over 8,300 messages, up to 25,000, is $86.99 / £69.99, plus any voice notes, video and photos per unit. Chats over 25,000 messages can't be analysed yet.
Voice notes: Included up to your package's media allowance. Over it, and on a Large chat, 96¢ / 80p a minute, charged by the half-minute, per file, because each one is transcribed separately.
Photos: Included up to your package's media allowance. Over it, and on a Large chat, 39¢ / 31p each, because each one is described separately.
Videos: Included up to your package's media allowance. Over it, and on a Large chat, $1.20 / £1 a minute, charged by the half-minute, per file, because each one is described separately.
The total: Rounded up to the next .99. The few pence or cents it adds are shown on the report line of your quote; the media lines never change.

UK customers are quoted in pounds and everyone else in US dollars; the server picks the currency, not the browser.
You can pay by card through Stripe, or with account credits if you have them.
The quoted total is what you are charged. It never goes up after you pay.
If a paid report cannot be produced, the payment is refunded automatically, to your card or back to your credits.

Step 4: What the AI actually sees

This is the part most tools are vague about, so here it is plainly. The chat text is anonymised before it leaves the server, and the media files are not, because they cannot be.

Names become labels: Participant names, phone numbers, email addresses and links are replaced before the text is sent. Senders become Participant A, Participant B and so on; other people mentioned in the messages become Person 1, Person 2; places become Place 1.
The map stays with us: The link between a real name and its label is never sent to a provider or written to the logs. For a paid report it is kept encrypted with that report, so that only your account sees the real names when the report is opened, and it is deleted with the report.
Structure is preserved: Timestamps, message order and who said what are kept intact, so the analysis is still about the real conversation.
Media goes as-is: A voice note, image or video cannot be anonymised, so the file itself is sent to the AI provider. Transcripts and descriptions that come back are run through the same anonymiser before they are stored.
Which providers: Chat text is analysed by a large language model at OpenAI. Voice notes and images go to whichever media provider this deployment is configured with, which is OpenAI unless an operator has set Google Gemini or OpenRouter. Live screen-capture audio is streamed to Gladia for provisional transcription using its EU region. We request deletion of the live session when capture stops or reaches its time limit; Gladia's plan-specific retention terms apply to any provider-side data.

If you would rather a particular file never left our server, simply do not attach it. The chat text on its own still produces a complete report. Read the privacy page

Step 5: Read your report

The report opens in your browser and stays in your dashboard. Findings are tied back to short verbatim quotes from the conversation, under the same participant labels the AI saw, so you can check any claim against the chat itself. Look at a sample report

Overview: Message count, the participants the export contains and the date range actually analysed.
Participants: Per-sender message counts and how each person shows up in the conversation.
Relationship dynamics: How the participants relate to each other in these messages.
Behaviour patterns: Rhythm, reply speed, message length and what each person does when a topic gets difficult.
Time analysis: When messages were sent, and how quickly people replied.
Specialised analysis: The section for the report type you chose: relationship, power dynamics, claim consistency, denial and contradiction patterns, or control and pressure patterns.
Media: Transcripts of your voice notes and descriptions of your images, labelled to match the chat.
Recommendations: Practical suggestions drawn from what the analysis found.
Follow-up questions: Ask your own question about the conversation and get an answer grounded in the same chat. Each question costs one credit.
PDF export: Download the whole report as a PDF to keep or share.

How long it takes

Analysis runs as a background job on our servers rather than in your browser tab, so you can close the page and come back to it. A short, text-only chat is a single AI call and finishes quickly. A long chat, or one with a lot of voice notes, takes longer, because every voice note is transcribed and every image described separately before the report is assembled. If a job fails for good, it is refunded automatically instead of being left in limbo.

What happens to your upload afterwards

Your chat is briefly written to the server while it is received, then encrypted, and the readable copy is deleted, normally within seconds.
The encrypted upload and the media attached to it are deleted about an hour after your paid report finishes.
An upload that nobody buys a report for is deleted after seven days. If a paid report fails and we refund it automatically, the upload is deleted about an hour after the refund, unless you order another report on it before then, in which case the rules above apply to the new order.
The report stays in your account, and reopening it shows your own real names back in, restored from an encrypted map kept only for that report; nobody else who might view it sees anything but labels.

What Chat Forensics does not do

It does not decide evidential weight: Reports are AI-generated interpretations. They can be incomplete or wrong, are not expert reports or medical or psychological diagnoses, and do not determine whether a report or source material is admissible or authentic, or what evidential weight it should receive.
It cannot prove what happened: A claim consistency or denial and contradiction report points at patterns in the language that are consistent with a behaviour. It cannot establish what anyone actually did or intended.
It does not touch WhatsApp: There is no login to your WhatsApp account, no access to your phone and no way to recover messages that were never exported.
It is not a monitoring tool: It analyses a conversation you already have and are entitled to analyse. It cannot watch a chat as it happens.

Still have a question? The FAQ covers exports, file limits, pricing, privacy and refunds in more detail. Read the FAQ