Introducing Dictate: Voice-to-Text, Wherever You Work

Introducing Dictate: Voice-to-Text, Wherever You Work

We built Dictate for all the typing that happens when you're not in a visit.

Hold a key, speak, and your words appear as text wherever your cursor is, in any application on your computer. The referral, the email, the quick note between patients: in your voice, no typing on your keyboard.

The note was done, but you were still typing.

Our AI scribe changed the visit. The note from the room writes itself now, in your structure, ready for your review before the next patient walks in. That part is solved.

Then you close the note and start typing again. The referral that has to go out today. The form the scribe never sees. The message to a colleague, the reply in the portal, the note you scribble between patients so you don't forget. None of it came from the visit, so none of it got documented for you. It's still you, the keyboard and the minutes it takes.

There's always been a workaround: your phone's dictation, or whatever voice-to-text your computer came with. But those tools were built for texting your family, not for clinical language. They stumble on drug names, mangle doses and turn an eponym into nonsense. So most clinicians give up and go back to typing, because fixing the mistakes takes longer than the dictation saved. You told us as much. So we built the version that works.

One key. Any field.

Heidi Dictate lives behind a single hotkey. Click into any text field, press and hold, and speak. Release, and your words land where your cursor is. No session to start, no button to find, no tab to switch.

With the Heidi desktop app open, it works across your whole computer: your EHR, a document, your email, a messaging app, a text editor, any field that takes text. In the browser, it works everywhere inside Heidi. And if your cursor isn't in a field when you speak, Heidi shows a clipboard with the text ready to paste, so a thought you had walking between rooms doesn't disappear.

The difference you'll notice is accuracy. Dictate is purpose built for medical grade use, evaluated on medical term recognition and compliant with relevant standards. Plus, you can speak commands to format and correct as you go or adjust the output tone to suit the application. It's voice-to-text that understands the words you use.

What you get

• Your voice across the whole computer. Press, speak and your words land wherever your cursor is: your EHR, a referral letter, an email, a messaging app or a browser tab. Anywhere you already type, you can speak instead.
• Built for clinical language. Dictate is purpose-built for medical-grade use, evaluated on how well it recognizes medical terms and compliant with the relevant standards. Accuracy held to a clinical bar, not a consumer one.
• Instant and hands-free. One press-and-hold hotkey. If you have the Heidi Desktop App, it’s immediately ready to use.
• Set up your way. Pick the key that starts and stops dictation, and rebind it if it clashes with something you use. Heidi also shapes the output to suit whichever window you're dictating into, with the option to set your own style.
• Speak in shorthand. A short trigger expands into full text, so "ros" drops in a whole review-of-systems template, pulled from the snippets you already keep in Heidi Scribe, or set your own. Say "new paragraph" or "scratch that," and it punctuates and fixes as you go.

What it's like in practice

For Kenneth Liu, a periodontist in the United States, Dictate has changed his work for the better.

"The fact that it works across every application, not just Heidi, makes it incredibly useful. Instead of jotting notes between patients so I don't forget, I just verbalize straight into a text editor and move on. It saves so much time, and I'm already finding new places to use it: my EHR, to-do lists, emails, and messages.

— Kenneth Liu, Periodontist, United States

Why we built it

"Scribe gave clinicians the visit note back. Dictate gives them their voice everywhere else the day takes them, with a model built for clinical language instead of guessing at it. This is care that moves at the speed of the clinician, not the keyboard.”

— Dr. Thomas Kelly, Co-founder and CEO, Heidi

Where Dictate fits

Dictate joins Scribe and Evidence as part of Heidi, your AI Care Partner. Scribe handles the visit. Evidence brings trusted clinical research to the point of care. Dictate covers the typing that happens everywhere else. Each one lifts another piece of the administrative load off your day, so more of your attention goes where you trained it to go: the patient in front of you.

Availability

Dictate is available now in the Heidi desktop ppp, and works across every window and application on your computer whenever the dasktop app is open. The availability of Dictate and other Heidi features may vary by market and is subject to the legal and regulatory requirements in each jurisdiction.

You didn't train for years to spend the day typing into boxes. Hand that part to your voice.

Learn more and download the Heidi desktop app to get started.