Say it once. Confirm it item by item.

Technicians are good at fixing equipment and bad at typing notes on a phone in a hot attic. The result is familiar: "replaced cap, works now". Voice notes close that gap. The tech talks for a minute about what they found, what they did and what they used. TradesWork turns it into a record the office can bill, sell and look back on, and shows the tech each piece to confirm before anything is saved.

What a voice note turns into

Say a tech finishes a no-cooling call and records: "Capacitor's swollen, 45/5. Contactor's pitted. Replaced both. Coil's dirty, recommend a cleaning and a surge protector." Here's what comes back for review:

The model gets the job type, the equipment on site (type, make and install year) and your active price book. It's told never to invent work that wasn't said and to leave lists empty when nothing applies. Any price book reference it returns that doesn't exist is moved to the unmatched list.

Confirm, then write

Nothing in the review screen is saved yet. Every finding, part and option has its own checkbox: findings and parts start ticked, draft options start unticked, and the note can be edited or left out. When the tech taps Add selected:

• The note and the ticked findings are added to the job's notes.
• Ticked parts go onto the invoice as normal lines, using the price book's price and tax setting.
• Ticked options become draft estimate options the tech can edit before presenting.

Each step goes through the same paths a tech would use by hand, so permissions, the audit trail and the invoice math are the same. If a step fails part way, a retry skips the parts already done, so nothing is added twice.

No signal, no problem

Voice notes follow the same rules as the rest of the technician app. A recording made with no signal is saved as an audio file on the phone, not in the app's memory, and waits there. The card shows "Waiting for signal". When the phone reconnects, it uploads, transcribes and structures the note. The transcript is kept as soon as it exists, so if structuring fails, a retry doesn't pay for transcription again. Each recording has its own ID, so a replay returns the same result without a second AI call.

Recordings are mono audio at 64 kbps, about 8 KB a second. That keeps a five-minute note small enough to upload on one bar of LTE.

Typing still works

Not every shop will connect speech-to-text on day one, and some techs prefer the keyboard. The same box takes typed text or the phone keyboard's built-in dictation. Tap Turn into a job record and the text goes through the same structuring and the same confirm screen. If speech-to-text isn't connected, the app says so plainly and points to the keyboard microphone. It never pretends to have heard something.

Where voice notes earn their keep

HVAC service. Findings with severity are the payoff. A dirty coil marked low on a 14-year-old system, plus a failed capacitor marked high, is a replacement conversation the comfort advisor can start from the job, not from memory.

Plumbing. Parts matching saves the most time: fittings, valves and supply lines named out loud land on the invoice at price book prices, and the odd part that isn't in the book shows up in the unmatched list for the office to add.

Electrical. Hazards like double taps or scorching come out as high or urgent findings, which makes them easy to find later, and easy to pair with a safety inspection form.

Maintenance visits. On a membership tune-up, a 30-second note covers the readings and the recommendations, and the draft options set up the next visit's sale.

What makes a good voice note

The structuring is only as good as what the tech says. Five habits make the difference, and they're worth putting on a card in the truck:

Readings are worth a sentence too ("superheat 12, subcooling 9, 41 µF on a 45"), because they go into the note where the next tech will see them. If a tech rambles, the clean note trims the restarts and side comments, but the original words are kept with the capture, so nothing is lost if the summary misses a detail.

A good test after the first week: pick five jobs, read only the job note and findings, and ask whether a different tech could walk in tomorrow and know what's going on. If the answer is no, the fix is usually habit two or three on the list.

How it compares with ServiceTitan

ServiceTitan's AI around the field is spread across paid tiers. Its Field Pro page describes AI-generated audio briefings before arrival and recording that starts the moment the tech arrives.¹ Its Max for Commercial page describes voice-built equipment records on a site walk.² Those are different tools from a tech's own dictated summary. If what you want is coaching from recorded sales conversations, look at call scorecards; if you want better job notes and fewer missed parts, voice notes are the tool.

Getting techs to use it

1. Connect speech-to-text and turn on AI in settings. Check the owner's AI usage page after the first week.
2. Clean up the price book names techs actually say ("cap", "contactor", "hard start kit") so matching works.
3. Show techs the confirm screen first, not the record button. Trust comes from seeing they're in control.
4. Ask for one voice note per completed job for two weeks, then look at the unmatched list together.