Lembic
Lembic is a macOS application that extracts your iMessage conversations and exports them into structured, AI-friendly formats like JSON, CSV, or plain text. It accesses the local iMessage database, preserving metadata such as timestamps, sender/recipient, and message threading. The tool also extracts shared media and attachments, providing a complete archive ready for processing by language models. Ideal for fine-tuning, analysis, or building personalized chatbots, Lembic processes all data locally to maintain privacy, never uploading your messages to external servers.
- Category
- Video
- Pricing
- Paid
Problem solved
iMessages are stored in Apple's proprietary format, making them inaccessible for AI tools that require structured text data. Lembic solves this by converting conversations into clean, machine-readable formats, enabling users to leverage their chat history for language model training, sentiment analysis, or personal backups without manual copy-pasting or coding.
Use cases
- Fine-tune a language model on your personal messaging style to create a custom chatbot.
- Analyze conversation sentiment and communication patterns over time.
- Enable AI-powered semantic search across years of iMessage history.
- Create backups of important conversations in a portable format.
- Feed chat data into AI tools for generating summaries or reports.
Audience
- Developers
- Data Scientists
- Hobbyists
- Researchers
Pros
- Preserves full message threading and metadata
- Processes data locally, ensuring privacy
- Supports multiple output formats tailored for AI ingestion
- Handles attachments and media export
Cons
- Limited to Apple's iMessage (no Android or other messaging apps)
- Requires a Mac to run the export process
- May need technical knowledge to integrate with AI pipelines
Official website: https://textstoai.com/
Canonical LambdaBase page: https://www.lambdabase.com/tools/lembic