I’m curious if anyone uses voice recognition during inspections? In the 90’s I was using a voice recorder to record my observations and would transcribe them to text using a laptop on site. This saved me a TON of time. Currently we use the voice command function on our phone/device to take photos all the time everyday. Need a pic on top of the upper kitchen cabinets? Get the device up there and say “capture” and you got the pic, how about the coils in the AHU? Carefully stick the device in the removed filter area and say “cheese”, you got your pic. It’s amazing how far we have come in tech in the last couple decades and hard to imagine where it will go from here with all the advances with SI in the near future.
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No, I don’t use any voice recording devices other than my bodycam and digital camera / camcorder. Realtors are going the way of the dinosaur and telephone books and if we aren’t careful home inspectors will too. I have no interest in providing machine learning to the Artificial Super Intelligence.
But that’s just me.
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I never did use voice recognition for anything inspection related.
When I started my business back in 03, I started out with a Dell Axim 5 PDA which I had my software on and carried a camera for pictures, when I got back to the office, I would download the report and pictures to my PC and then put it all together. Today I use my phone for everything and at this point in my career I don’t plan on changing that process unless I’m forced to. 
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I’ve used a voice recorder from the beginning for on site notes. It saved a lot of time back at the office and doing reports. I take lots of pictures, even non issues for record, and it saved lots of time.
When Dragon Naturally speaking came out, not the original but later version, I tried it. What a complete waste of time! No matter how much I trained it Dragon never interpreted 90%+ properly. Any background noise picked up would completely confuse it.
Until AI/SI becomes ready for prime time I would not consider it. I have a voicemail speech to text function run by AI/SI. Instead of listening I am suppose to be able to read the VMail. Even though it is way more accurate than Dragon ever was it still SUX! So I still have to listen to VMails that are important to hear.
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I have a buddy who uses a voice recognition recorder on every inspection. He doesn’t do a shred of his report on site. When he gets home, he replays the recording and does his report. Since it only records when someone is talking, he only has 40-50 min of actual recording and he didn’t spend a second pausing with a report during the inspection, so his total time is similar to mine. And he has a recording of all the interaction, too.
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I just use talk-to-text. I dictate the majority of my report via GBoard right into the report. Although with the voice features on the AI interfaces, that’s already antiquated 
. I have yet to use the API key feature that Spectora has released to connect to my Perplexity account, but when (if) I get some downtime in the winter, I’m going to play with that. It would be great to be able to dictate the narratives and have them automatically drop in where I need them.
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That LG Cosmos belongs in a museum. 
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That would be ideal. I was thinking a great starting point would be being able to take a photo and voice command it to the section of the report where it belongs. It seems that simple limited terms like “Report roof”, “report plumbing”, “report electrical”, etc. would be very plausible.
That photo plus a short voice tag into the right report section idea is interesting. I’ve heard inspectors like talk-to-text for narratives, but the routing piece still feels fiddly. Has anyone gotten that working cleanly on site?
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I haven’t seen it yet. Hopefully soon.
Well kinda. I basically type a short tag to pull up a list of possible narratives onsite. Instead of typing, you can also use voice text in the search box. I do that sometimes, but mostly I still type instead of using voice. Some of the new AI driven software can also pull up likely narratives based just off the pictures you take.
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Dave, I’m a Florida inspector and the builder of Warrior Inspection Network (my vendor thread: Florida inspectors: permit history pulled into your wind mit and 4-point workflow), so weigh my bias. I built it around exactly this: you talk through the inspection, and what you say lands in the right place on the 4-point and wind-mit forms, with photos and findings going to the right section. It’s not perfect, and I’m still finding where it breaks. If you or anyone here wants to try it on a real inspection, I’ll set up a free trial, and I want blunt feedback.
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That’s great, you’re on the leading edge of the future of inspection software IMHO. I’m interested, but would warn… I wouldn’t recommend anyone “test” any kind of software on an actual “real” inspection. (maybe with exceptions of a property with no time constraints, others present, etc and performed with backup in case the new tech crashes). The first several times I used HIP I sat in my office and “simulated” inspections taking photos from actual inspections inputting them and navigating in the new software etc.
Good luck!
Thank you, Dave. I appreciate you taking the time, and the advice is well taken. As an inspector myself, the thought of software failing mid-inspection is exactly what worries me, so it means a lot to hear it said plainly by someone who’s been through it. I’ll keep that in mind as I build.
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When I was working on my own software recently, I was pleasantly surprised at how responsive it was to my voice at loading comments etc. At the same time, AI simply isn’t intuitive. No matter how detailed the instructions, AI will fail to follow.
As an exercise, I recently tried to get AI to list every inspection software currently on the market. It didn’t come close to finding them all. And the excuses that it made for missing them was revealing about the limitations.
So, good luck to you. I think there are somewhere between 40 and 50 competitors, so the pie slices are shrinking, but if that article in RE Magazine is accurate, it’s a surprisingly large pie, moneywise, for only 30,000 customers.
Personally, an annoying quirk in voice to text transcription is that with all of them, when I say “and”, they type “in” regardless of how much I stress the “d” and regardless of the sentence construction. When applicable, I’ve tried to train them to no avail.
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Ryan, the short tag for the narrative list sounds like the practical move. Voice in the search box as a helper, not the whole workflow, makes sense. Thanks for laying that out.
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Dave, this is exactly what Fielded does, so weigh the bias: I’m its developer, not an inspector.
It works the way you describe, minus the fixed commands. You take the photo and say what you see in plain words, something like “water staining on the ceiling below the upstairs bath, monitor”. It files the photo and the note under the right section of the report, sets the status and drafts the narrative. No “report plumbing” needed. If it picks the wrong section, you tell it or hit undo.
On Emmanuel’s Dragon experience: recognition is a different animal now, but it still mishears. So the original recording stays attached to the finding, and you can replay what was actually said.
Agreed on not testing on a paid job. There’s a sample inspection in the app to poke at from the desk, and it can build the section structure from one of your own past reports (PDF), so there’s no new template to learn.
It’s free for InterNACHI members through the end of 2026: InterNACHI® Member Offer | Fielded
Blunt feedback welcome.
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Fair concern, and worth asking any software vendor. It depends which door the data goes through. Free consumer chat apps often do train on what you type unless you switch it off. Software built on the paid business APIs is different: those terms say the provider doesn’t train on customer content. That’s how Fielded works, and it’s in the privacy policy.
On the dinosaur part, you have a point. No model crawls an attic or puts its name on a report. What it can take over is the typing. The inspectors who get squeezed probably won’t be replaced by AI. They’ll be competing with an inspector who gets the same report out two hours sooner.
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This sounds like a good idea.
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Dragon Naturally Speaking. Used it for years in my office, Outlook for emails, Word…
Training takes time.
Now it’s AI. Practice keeping narratives simple. Once canned you build reports much faster.
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