Glossary
Chat Transcript
A conversation taken out of the chat app and turned into a document. Transcripts are how a support case, a legal request or a compliance review gets a fixed, shareable record of what was said.
General definition
Chat Transcript is a snapshot of a conversation exported from the messaging system into a form that can be read, shared and stored outside it: a PDF sent to a customer after a support session, a JSON or CSV file handed to a legal team, or a text file attached to a case record. Where chat history is the live, scrollable record inside the app, a transcript is fixed at the moment of export and usually covers a defined time range or a single conversation.
A transcript is only useful if it is complete and trustworthy. A good export includes:
- Participants: who was in the conversation, with stable identifiers, not just display names that can change
- Timestamps: when each message was sent, ideally with the time zone, and when it was edited or deleted
- Content: the message text, attachments or references to them, reactions, and system events such as someone joining or leaving
- Provenance: who exported it, when, and from which system, so it can be tied back to the audit log
Transcripts serve four common purposes. Support teams send them to customers or attach them to tickets. Sales and success teams keep them as a record of what was agreed. Legal teams produce them in response to discovery requests or subpoenas, where the format and completeness can be challenged. Compliance teams review them during supervision of regulated communications, for example in financial services or when investigating a complaint about a patient conversation.
The legal and compliance uses raise the bar. An export must not silently drop deleted or edited messages if the retention policy says they should be kept, it must handle attachments and not just text, and it needs to be reproducible: exporting the same conversation twice should give the same result. That is why transcript export belongs to the server-side archive rather than to whatever a client app happens to have cached, and why it is usually an administrative function rather than a user one in regulated products.
In the Ethora ecosystem
In Ethora, transcripts come from the server-side archive rather than from a device. An app owner or an authorised team member can export conversations through the admin panel, and the same data is reachable through the API, so a support tool, a case management system or an eDiscovery process can pull transcripts programmatically. Because the archive is read-only and governed by the App’s retention settings, an export reflects what the compliance policy says should exist, not what a user chose to keep.
Exports are administrative actions that can be recorded in the compliance audit trail and shipped as immutable logs to S3, so an auditor can see who produced which transcript and when. For healthcare customers this matters twice over: a transcript of a patient conversation is protected health information, so who can export it is an access control question, and the Trust & Safety system can have removed accidentally shared identifiers before the record was ever written.
