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 at the top of the consultation.

Both are off unless your practice has switched AI features on, and neither replaces reading the record. Treat what comes back the way you would treat a note written by a locum — useful, and worth checking.

Turning it on#

Settings›Practice Settings›Features & Modules

One switch controls both: Enable AI features. With it off, the Record button, the AI Note row and the summary panel simply do not appear, and nothing about a consultation, a stay, a groom or a sale changes.

Note

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

Recording a visit#

Who can do this

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, on the right beside the pencil — on a consultation, a hospital or boarding stay, a groom or a sale. It is only there once the record exists, so open the patient from the queue (or the ward list) first.

Note

One recording at a time, across the whole practice — while one is running the indicator stays on screen wherever you go, and pressing it takes you back to whatever is being recorded.

Press Record. FastVet explains what is about to happen and asks you to confirm.
Press Start Recording and carry on with the consultation. Speak normally — you do not have to dictate in headings.
When you are done, stop the recording. It uploads with a progress bar, then the AI Note row says “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.

Note

The write-up gets its own note and touches nothing you have written. Anything already in Doctor's Notes stays exactly as you left it, so jotting “vomiting 3 days, owner worried re: string” before you start recording costs you nothing.

Tip

You can leave the consultation while recording — go and look something up, take a call, open another patient. A recording indicator stays on screen wherever you go, and the recording keeps running until you stop it.

Note

Recording stops itself after five minutes, and the note is written from whatever it captured up to that point. For a long consultation, record the examination rather than the whole visit.

If recording cannot start, the confirmation box stays open and tells you why, and the button changes to Try Again — fix what it names, then press it. The four it can report are a microphone FastVet has not been allowed to use, no microphone connected, a microphone another app is holding, or a browser that cannot record at all.

If the write-up is slow, FastVet tells you so and lets you get on — “AI processing is taking longer than expected. It will appear on the consultation when ready.” You can leave the consultation and come back to it; the note lands on the visit either way. Do not re-record: you would end up with two write-ups of the same consultation.

Checking what comes back#

Careful

The note lands in the AI Note, which is internal — like Doctor's Notes, and unlike Client Notes, which the owner reads in the portal. If you want the client to have take-home instructions, type them into Client Notes yourself. See Clinical notes.

The AI Note is part of the record in its own right: it appears on the patient's clinical history under its own heading, so a colleague reading the history later can tell which part of the visit was written by the AI and which by the vet.

Note

What was actually said is kept too. FastVet stores the transcript of every recording against the record, alongside the note the AI wrote from it. Editing the note — or clearing it altogether — does not touch either. Ask your administrator if you ever need to go back to the original.

Two things are worth a glance every time:

Is it about this patient? Read the note before finishing the visit. It becomes part of the permanent clinical record the moment you press Done.
Did it hear anything at all? An empty or near-empty note almost always means the microphone was not picking you up — a headset unplugged, a browser permission denied, a tablet muted.

If the note comes back empty, the recording is gone — there is nothing to re-process. Write the notes by hand for this visit, then fix the microphone before relying on it again: check the browser has permission to use it, and that the right device is selected.

Tip

Before a clinic where you plan to dictate, do one throwaway recording on a test patient. It is the only way to find a dead microphone before it costs you a consultation's notes.

The Previous Visit Summary#

Where a patient has been seen before, the consultation opens with a Previous Visit Summary panel above the items — a few bullet points covering what has been going on. It is there so you do not have to read three consultations to pick up a case you have not seen.

Note

It arrives collapsed — a single line reading “Previous Visit Summary” with a robot icon. Tap it to open, and tap the header again to fold it away. It is easy to miss until you know to look for it.

Summaries are generated in the background from the patient's history, so a patient seen for the first time has none, and a patient seen yesterday may not have caught up yet.

Correcting a summary#

The summary is editable, which matters — it is what you do when one is wrong, out of date, or has come back garbled.

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

What you save replaces the generated summary and stays until a new one is generated. Correcting a summary that is plainly wrong is worth the thirty seconds — every colleague who opens that patient next reads what you leave behind.

Careful

The panel carries its own footer: “AI-generated — may be inaccurate. Verify against the full clinical record.” That is not boilerplate. A summary is a shortcut into the history, not a substitute for it — check the clinical history before you act on something clinically significant.

If you would rather not use it#

Switching Enable AI features off removes both features from every screen. Notes already written stay where they are — they are ordinary consultation notes once saved, and nothing about a past visit changes.

You want to	Do this
Stop using it practice-wide	An administrator turns Enable AI features off under Features & Modules.
Stop using it yourself	Just do not press Record. Nothing is recorded unless you start it and confirm.
Discard a write-up you do not want	Open the AI Note, press Clear and confirm, before finishing the visit.

Note

If your practice needs the detail of how recordings and summaries are processed and stored — for a data-protection policy, or to answer a client — ask FastVet rather than guessing from this page.