Help Centre › Clinical care

Voice notes & AI summaries

Dictate a consultation and have the notes written up for you, and read a one-glance summary of the patient's last visits.

FastVet has two features that write for you. Voice notes record what is said and turn it into a structured note — on a consultation, a hospital or boarding stay, a groom or a sale. The Previous visit summary condenses a patient's recent history into a few lines on the consultation screen.

Neither replaces reading the record. Treat what comes back like a note written by a locum — useful, and worth checking.

Turning it on#

Settings›Practice Settings›Features & Modules

Voice notes are controlled by the AI features switch. With it off, the Record button and the AI Note row do not appear.

Note

See Features & Modules. Only an administrator can change it.

Recording a visit#

Who can do this

On consultations and hospital and boarding stays, the Doctor role — the same role that can write in the notes. Everyone else sees the notes read-only and gets no Record button.

The Record button sits on the AI Note row of the Notes panel, beside the pencil. It only appears once the record exists, so open the patient from the queue (or the ward list) first.

Press Record, read the confirmation, and press Start Recording.
Carry on with the consultation. Speak normally — you do not have to dictate in headings.
When you are done, press Stop & send on the recording bar. The recording uploads, then the AI Note row shows “Writing up the voice note…”.
A SOAP-style note appears in the AI Note. Read it, correct anything it got wrong — it is an ordinary editable note — and finish the visit as usual.

The write-up goes into its own note. Anything in Doctor's Notes stays as you left it, so you can jot down a few points before you start recording.

Tip

You can leave the screen while recording. A bar showing Recording for the patient and a microphone level stays on screen wherever you go; press it to go back to the record. Only one recording can run at a time.

If the microphone stops picking up sound, the recording bar warns you. A recording with no sound in it is not sent — FastVet tells you, and you can record again once the microphone is working.

If recording cannot start, the confirmation box tells you why — no permission to use the microphone, no microphone connected, a microphone another app is using, or a browser that cannot record — and the button changes to Try Again.

The note can take a while to write. You do not need to wait: leave the record and come back — the note lands on it when ready. Do not record again, or you will get two write-ups of the same visit.

Checking what comes back#

Note

The AI Note is internal, like Doctor's Notes. The owner sees Client Notes, so type any take-home instructions there yourself. See Clinical notes.

The AI Note appears on the patient's clinical history under its own heading, so anyone reading it later can tell which part was written by the AI.

FastVet also keeps the transcript of each recording. Editing or clearing the note does not change it — ask your administrator if you need the original.

Each time, check:

Is it about this patient? Read the note before you finish the visit.
Is it complete? A thin note usually means the microphone was not picking you up well.

Tip

Before a clinic where you plan to dictate, do one short test recording on a test patient.

The Previous visit summary#

Where a patient has been seen before, the consultation shows a Previous visit summary panel, next to the diagnosis and medications — a few bullet points covering what has been going on.

It starts collapsed, as a single line with a robot icon. Tap it to open, and tap the header again to fold it away.

Summaries are generated in the background after a consultation is finished, so a patient seen for the first time has none, and a very recent visit may not be included yet.

Correcting a summary#

If a summary is wrong or out of date, you can edit it.

Open the Previous visit summary panel.
Press the pencil in its header.
Edit the text, and press Save.

Your text replaces the summary until a new one is generated.

The panel's footer reads “AI-generated — may be inaccurate. Verify against the full clinical record.” Check the clinical history before acting on anything clinically significant.

If you would rather not use it#

Notes already written stay where they are when AI features are switched off. The Previous visit summary is not affected by the switch.

You want to	Do this
Stop voice notes practice-wide	An administrator turns AI features off under Features & Modules.
Stop using it yourself	Do not press Record. Nothing is recorded unless you start it.
Stop a recording without sending it	Press Cancel on the recording bar.
Discard a write-up you do not want	Open the AI Note, press Clear, then Yes, clear.

Note

For detail on how recordings and summaries are processed and stored — for a data-protection policy, or to answer a client — ask FastVet.