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A Playbook is a set of instructions that tells StageWhisper what to pay attention to during a call. When you start a listening session, you pick a Playbook. The AI reads your guidance and uses it to decide what signals to surface. You might have one Playbook for sales discovery calls, another for customer research interviews, and a third for candidate evaluations. Each one focuses the AI on different things.

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Creating a Playbook

Open the desktop app settings (gear icon), go to the Playbooks tab, and click New playbook. Each Playbook has two parts: The guidance field is the most important part. Write it in plain language, as if you were briefing a colleague who’s going to sit in on your call and whisper suggestions to you.

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Writing good guidance

Be specific about what you want the AI to watch for. Vague instructions produce vague signals. A weak Playbook:
A stronger Playbook:
The more context you give, the more relevant the coaching signals become.

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Checklist topics

When you write guidance, StageWhisper can extract checklist topics from it. These are goals or talking points that the AI tracks during your call. After the session, you can see which topics were covered and which were missed. For example, a discovery call Playbook might track:
  • Identified current workflow
  • Discussed budget range
  • Confirmed decision-maker
  • Agreed on next step
You can add these manually when creating the Playbook, or let StageWhisper suggest them based on your guidance text.

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Voice personalization

Instead of typing guidance from scratch, you can record a voice message describing how you approach this type of call. StageWhisper processes the recording and generates guidance text that reflects your natural style and priorities. To use it:
  1. Start a new Session in the Desktop app.
  2. You will be asked to either record new Playbook or skip and use already active one.
  3. Record yourself talking about what matters in this kind of call. Speak naturally. A minute or two is enough.
  4. StageWhisper processes the recording and generates a summary with extracted checklist topics.
  5. If you’re happy with the results just start the call. Otherwise you can either re-record or edit new Playbook in the Settings window.
This is useful when you know what you want but find it easier to talk through it than write it out.

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Managing Playbooks

You can create, edit, and delete Playbooks from the desktop app settings or from the web dashboard under the Playbooks tab. Changes sync between both. There’s no limit to how many Playbooks you can create. You select which one to use before each session.

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Personal and team playbooks

Playbooks you create are yours, and nobody else on your team gets them. If you’re on a team, the desktop app marks each of your own playbooks Personal. Playbooks your team shares with you are marked From your team. Click Set active to use one on your next call, or Make a copy to get a personal version you can change. You can’t edit or delete the team’s version. Team admins add team playbooks in the web dashboard under Team > Playbooks, and everyone on the team gets them. A playbook an admin creates in the desktop app stays personal, like anyone else’s.

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Reference files

You can attach documents to a Playbook. During a session, StageWhisper searches those files and pulls in relevant excerpts when the conversation touches on something covered in them. Some things people attach:
  • Pricing guides, so signals can reference exact figures when a prospect pushes back on cost
  • Product spec sheets for technical questions
  • Interview question banks for structured hiring calls
  • Case studies worth citing during a pitch

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Adding files

Open the desktop app settings, go to the Playbooks tab, click Edit on a Playbook, and scroll to the Reference Documents section. Click the drop zone to pick a file, or drag files onto it. Supported formats: PDF, DOCX, TXT, MD, CSV. Limits:
  • Up to 5 files per Playbook
  • 10 MB per file
  • Text-based PDFs only (scanned or image-only PDFs won’t work)
Files are processed on your device. StageWhisper breaks the document into passages, generates a short summary, and builds a search index. Takes a few seconds per file.

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How files work during sessions

At the start of a session, StageWhisper tells the AI what files are available by sending a one-line summary of each. Once the call is past the greetings, StageWhisper searches your files for what the call is about. After that, it searches again when a new topic, person or date comes up. The search runs on your computer, and StageWhisper hands the passages it finds to the AI. It keeps them for later in the call, so the same fact doesn’t need a second search. The result is more specific coaching. Instead of “handle this pricing objection,” you might get “reference the Arthur Pewtey case study, 3.2x ROI in 6 months.” An insight that relies on a file ends with the file’s name.

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Privacy

Files stay on your device. They are never uploaded to any server. During sessions, only the passages a search finds go to the AI for analysis. They’re held in memory until the call ends and then discarded. No file content is saved on our servers. When an insight relies on a file, the file’s name is saved with that insight. If you remove a file from a Playbook, the original, its index, and all derived data are deleted from your device immediately.
If you use a remote AI assistant, your assistant does not have access to these files. They live on your device only, separate from your assistant’s knowledge base.