Recording Audio Guide

Many therapists at Quill find audio is the fastest way to give us the details from a therapy session. You sit down afterwards, talk for a couple of minutes about what mattered, and Quill turns it into a structured first draft. No typing, no scrolling, no clicking through fields.

This guide is the overview. The smaller guides linked below walk through specific pieces -- recording your first summary, pausing and resuming, picking a microphone, and what to do when something doesn't work.

What we mean by "audio recording"

This is a point we make a lot, but it bears repeating: Quill is not recording the therapy session itself. When the therapy session is happening, Quill isn't in the room. There's no microphone running, no transcript being captured, no AI listening for clinical material.

The recording happens after the therapy session, when you sit down to do your documentation. You record yourself -- your reflections on what happened, the parts you want included in the note. The client isn't there. The clinical conversation has already ended. The "audio" in audio recording is your audio, summarizing the work after the fact.

This is the central distinction between Quill and tools that record live sessions. We think the distinction matters, ethically and practically, and we put together therapysessionprivacy.org if you want our full take.

When recording is the right input mode

Audio works especially well when:

• You think faster than you type.
• You're more comfortable narrating than writing.
• You're trying to capture nuance -- tone, key phrases, subtle clinical impressions -- that's faster to say than to write out.
• You want to walk around the room or pace while doing your documentation.

Audio is one of three input modes alongside text and worksheets, and you can mix them however you'd like. A worksheet to check off the predictable details, a short audio recording for the unique parts of this particular therapy session -- a common combination, and a fast one.

How long should the recording be?

Most useful recordings are between 2 and 10 minutes. Shorter than 2 minutes and there's usually not enough detail for Quill to work with. Longer than 10 minutes and you're probably overshooting -- Quill is designed to work from a summary of the therapy session, not a play-by-play.

If your recording goes longer than the typical range, you'll see an alert on the page reminding you of this. It won't stop you from generating the documentation, but it's worth thinking about whether you can trim back to the essentials.