"Show in Finder" doesn't work when looking for Voice Memos

I have a workflow where I use Voice Memos and then right click, select "Services," then "Show in Finder" so I can drop the file into Otter.AI for transcribing. With the recent update to Tahoe 26.0.1, nothing happens when I click "Show in Finder."

MacBook Air, macOS 26.0

Posted on Oct 27, 2025 4:44 AM

Reply
Question marked as Top-ranking reply

Posted on Oct 27, 2025 4:50 AM

Export / share the memo manually


Instead of relying on “Show in Finder”, select the recording in Voice Memos → click the Share icon → choose “Save to Files” or “Export” to your desired Finder folder.

11 replies

Oct 27, 2025 7:41 AM in response to kewajo21

On the Mac, you should be able to launch the Voice Memos application, locate the specific recording, and then simply drag and drop that recording onto the Otter application, provided that the latter is designed to be a drop target. Otherwise, the drop target can be your Desktop and then on to Otter.


The Voice Memo recording is a *.m4a (Apple MPEG-4 audio) and its Spotlight search should be:

kind:mpeg-4

or

kind:audio +(.m4a)


Both just worked on my macOS Tahoe 26.0.1 to find .m4a audio including my Voice Memo items.


There is also an Apple Shortcuts action named Transcribe Audio that does what it says which with an appropriate Shortcut solution, might replace Otto.ai.


Here is a working example that writes out a file transcription.txt to the Desktop. It can be refined further to filter non-zero audio files with the .m4a file extension.





[Edited by Moderator]

Oct 27, 2025 7:15 AM in response to neuroanatomist

neuroanatomist wrote:

The workaround provided by my strigine colleague is a solution, but I also think that the Show in Finder command in the contextual menu should work.

Bugs can be reported to Apple here:
Feedback - macOS - Apple

It works as expected in Sequoia (15.7.1), which to me indicates it's a Tahoe bug.


https://discussions.apple.com/content/attachment/9748e1c9-484b-4e86-93dd-8c693f69541a

Love that " strigine " !


The continent we have not travelled to is Antartica


The days of travel ended Nov 2019 just before BC ( Before COVID-19 )


🦉-53


"Show in Finder" doesn't work when looking for Voice Memos

Welcome to Apple Support Community
A forum where Apple customers help each other with their products. Get started with your Apple Account.