Astro Scribe is an industry leader in customization, privacy and affordability

*For some plans, you can optionally use Astro Scribe’s own servers to transcribe the audio instead of your device.

Astro Scribe NEVER uses third parties to transcribe audio.

Customization

Our approach to custom template creation is really one of a kind in this space. It ensures consistency above all else. Other apps do not allow such fine-tuned control over specific wording - meaning the notes can come out looking different each time, and in a completely different style! In fact, usually the entire note is written by the AI - which is not only awful for customization, but exceedingly wasteful! Every bit of generated content costs energy and money, and that bill is not coming out of the owner of the app’s pocket, I guarantee you that.

With our method, the AI only has control over the answers to each question - not the wording or structure. For example, your template may look like this:

History:

{history}

    - Last Normal - {last_normal}

    - Frequency - {frequency}

Each field within curly brackets like {history}, {last_normal} and {frequency} seen above are the only parts that are filled in by the AI. You can still format those fields and the rest of the template. If you’re interested in this, definitely check out the chapter in our demo video on template customization to see just how easy it is to make a new custom template in Astro Scribe! The rest of the wording is the same every single time - so you can avoid wasting time converting it into your preferred format over and over like with other apps!

If this doesn’t quite suit you, the great news is you can go with the classic SOAP notes option and let the AI take over entirely! These are also built into the app and always available.

Privacy

This is how other apps work in this space:

1. The audio recording of you and your client is streamed to a third party transcription service such as Google’s Speech-to-Text API

   Why you should care: (Note ‘STT’ = Speech-to-Text)

   “you can opt into the data logging program. This program allows Google to use logged customer data to refine and improve the service quality of Cloud STT — and in exchange, you gain access to discounted pricing.”

   - https://docs.cloud.google.com/speech-to-text/docs/v1/data-logging

   Translation: To save money, some apps may even be opting into this sort of agreement where google will use your recordings to train their models.

   Here’s the pricing available without opting in, in case you doubt the likelihood of this: https://cloud.google.com/speech-to-text#pricing

   (As of 20/11/2025) the cost is $0.016 per minute of audio; meaning for just one vet using only 50 minutes of audio a day (5 x 10 minute consults) for 20 working days in a month, this ends up being $16 USD/month per user. That is an extremely generous underestimate - clearly, this is going to impact the cost of your subscription! Either that, or to get a discount, your private small talk is now Google’s training data in perpetuity. Whereas Astro Scribe handles the transcriptions either on your device or using our OWN servers, generating monumental savings.

   Here’s where it gets really concerning: “Google retains ownership of the models trained from that data” .

   This actually means google can train a Large Language Model on your recording, and then later that transcript can be extracted word-for-word from the training data by anybody! See Extracting Training Data from Large Language Models (Carlini et al., 2021). Here’s a full article on that research paper: https://avidml.org/blog/llm-privacy-plaigarism/

2. The raw transcription is sent straight to an AI company such as OpenAI.

   This means your name, the client’s name, the patient’s name and literally every word you spoke is potentially available to now be used in training for that AI company’s models. Once again, this can be extracted later by anyone.

This is a complete and utter failure to respect your privacy. Totally unacceptable - at least in our book. We strongly believe the user should be able to make an informed decision about this process.

Here’s how Astro Scribe works on the Solo Vet and Practice Classic plans:

1. The audio recording STAYS on your device - it’s transcribed locally, on your computer. Yep, zero third parties (like Google) have access to your audio. In fact, WE don’t even have access to your audio. It’s not even saved to your own device - you couldn’t even listen back to it later! Nobody will ever listen to that audio, or use it to train any models.

2. Then, still on your device, the transcription is anonymized by actual ‘human medicine’ grade privacy protections - meaning all names are removed to be re-identified later on. So every single name in the transcript is replaced with a pseudonym like NAME_1, NAME_2 etc. This is the same stuff that it is used in medical research when needing to de-identify swaths of data to ensure it can be collected and analysed in a public manner without violating anyone’s medical rights.

3. The de-identified transcript is sent off (with end-to-end encryption) for processing via a LLM (“AI”)

This literally means no third parties, not even ASTRO SCRIBE ITSELF ever has access to any personal/identifiable sensitive information.

We’ve never seen nor heard of another app coming even remotely close to us in this department. This is because they don’t want the added hassle of handling your transcription themselves - they would rather pay another service to handle this component for them; and this also translates to higher prices for you! We worked hard to add this to the app because we firmly believe in your right to privacy.

Lastly, we have even implemented a zero-trust encrypted communications policy on your local network for the sharing of notes and other sensitive information across your devices. This means even if your local network is exposed, no sensitive information is vulnerable.

Affordability

You may notice that our prices are WAY lower than our competitors’. As in, more than 50% lower in most cases!

The standard (as of 20/11/2025) price seems to be around $150 AUD/month per user. Whereas for 10 users we charge just $299 AUD per month total. That’s an 80% saving. AND you don’t have to fuss around with logins or worrying about what happens when you get a locum in. Astro Scribe is just there ready to go, on your device, at all times.

Our competitors have to charge more for a really, really simple reason: They pay for third party transcription services!

Because Astro Scribe has been painstakingly developed to transcribe your audio locally on your own device, we do not have to pay for this service - meaning YOU do not have to pay for this service. This saving is passed directly onto you.