Ambient Scribe: recording a visit

Ambient Scribe is the feature that lets you stop typing during a visit. Ona records the conversation, transcribes it, and uses it to draft the note and summary — so the documentation comes from what was actually said, not from what you remember to type afterward.

Recording every visit

Every visit can be recorded, whichever way you meet the patient:

• In person — start an onsite recording from the visit; the device's microphone captures the room.
• Over video — joining the video call captures the conversation automatically.

The controls live in the bar at the bottom of the visit and in the Recordings section of the visit sidebar.

The Recordings view

Go to Recordings in the Inputs section of the visit sidebar. It's a two-pane view: recordings on the left, the transcript on the right.

Before anything is captured, the left pane reads "No recordings yet — start an onsite recording or join the video call to capture this visit," and the right pane says "Transcript will be available shortly after you finish the meeting." You can also Upload a recording — an existing MP3, M4A, or WAV file, up to 100MB — which is handy for a visit recorded on another device.

A captured recording and its transcript

Once a visit is recorded, the panes fill in.

The Recordings pane lists each recording — e.g. "Main visit · Onsite recording · [date] · Ready." The Transcript pane shows the conversation broken into speaker-attributed turns with timestamps: the clinician's questions and the patient's answers, each labelled and timed. Export downloads the transcript.

The transcript is the bridge between the conversation and the chart. In a recorded visit, the clinician asking "How long has it been like that?" and the patient answering "For the last 4 periods" both appear here — and that same content flows into the note the AI drafts.

From recording to note and chart

The recording doesn't sit in isolation — it feeds the rest of the visit:

• Notes — with a recording present, Generate note drafts from what was said, filling the template's placeholders with real content rather than "N/A" (see Reviewing and signing an AI-drafted note). This is the difference between a note that writes itself and one you fill in by hand.
• Summary — the visit summary draws on the same source.
• The chart — details surfaced in the conversation inform the structured record.

So the single act of recording the visit is what makes the AI documentation useful. A visit with no recording gives the note generator nothing to work from; a recorded one gives it the whole conversation.

Consent and recording

Recording a clinical conversation may carry consent obligations depending on your jurisdiction and whether the visit is telehealth. The consent library includes a Telehealth Consent template for exactly this (see Building consent forms), and consents can be attached to services so they're sent automatically when a recorded service is booked. Make recording consent part of your intake rather than an afterthought.

In short

Record every visit, in person or on video. Ona transcribes it into a speaker-labelled record, and that transcript is what turns AI note generation from a template shell into a real draft. The less you type during the visit, the more the recording earns its keep.