Voice notes and proposals in the field
Speak a plot as you measure it; the server transcribes it and proposes records, which come back to the phone and the web to accept, edit or reject.
- For
- Field crew
- Time
- 3 minutes to read
- Where
- Field app — capture screen
- Updated
On this page
There are two ways to talk to the app:
- Speak fills the field you are on from what you say, on the phone.
- Voice note records a longer note — a whole plot, say. It is saved on the phone, uploaded at the next sync, transcribed on the server, and turned into proposed records for the stand’s methods.
- 1 Voice note: record while you work
- 2 A proposal: not counted yet
- 3 Accept · Edit · Reject
- Tap Voice note and speak naturally: “Plot P03. Sitka spruce, girth one hundred and twenty, crown class dominant. Another Sitka, diameter thirty-four…”. Say girth or diameter, and the unit.
- After the next sync, proposals come back. Each is a blue card with a dashed outline — PROPOSED · Voice note · Not counted yet — and the line it came from.
- Accept, edit or reject each one. Until you do, it is not data: it is left out of every result.
What the app will not do
- It never guesses a girth as a diameter or a missing unit: if it was not said, the proposal is flagged (no unit was said — taken as cm; check it) or waits for an edit.
- Remarks that fit no field (“check the deer fence”) are kept as text, never forced into a record.
- Nothing is accepted in bulk without an explicit confirmation.
The same proposals appear on the web under Field work › Voice notes, with the transcript — see Review what came back.
Your recording leaves the phone
Voice notes are sent to your organisation’s server and transcribed by the speech-to-text service your provider configured (an OpenAI-compatible service); a language model there reads the transcript to propose records. See Your data › AI processing.
What it doesn’t do (yet)
- Voice notes are transcribed only after a sync — not offline on the phone.
- The app does not phrase or send any summary of notes; you read them.