Talking your findings onto the ticket

A technician with dirty hands and a car in the air can say what they found instead of typing it. The block is headed Say what you found and it sits under each job's findings boxes on the technician's own repair-order screen.

That last part is worth reading twice. This is on the technician's screen — the one somebody gets when the ticket is assigned to them. An owner, manager or advisor opening the same car gets the full ticket instead, and there is no dictation control on it anywhere. If you are looking for the button and cannot find it, that is why.

Two ways it listens, and it tells you which

On most tablets the browser itself does the listening. The badge reads heard on this device and the line under it is the promise: Your tablet does the listening. No recording is made and nothing leaves the building — read it back, fix anything it misheard, then let the assistant draft the write-up. Press Dictate, talk, press Stop — listening….

Where the browser cannot do it, and only where a transcription service is connected, the button changes to Record a voice note. The badge names where it goes. With Workers AI it reads sent to workers-ai to be written down, with This browser can't listen on the device, so your recording is sent to workers-ai to be turned into text. It is used once to make the draft and is not kept. A shop set to Gemini or its primary model sees that service's name instead. The clip is held for that one request and written nowhere.

If neither is possible, there are no buttons at all rather than a button that fails — This browser can't listen on this device, and no connected model can turn a recording into text. Type what you found above — it goes on the ticket the same way.

Either way, what you heard lands in an editable box first. Read it, fix what it misheard, then press Draft the three C's.

The draft, and the confirm

A card appears under the job headed Draft findings with the job's name, a badge reading AI draft · not on the ticket yet, and the rule spelled out: The assistant wrote this from your voice note. Nothing has been saved to the job. Fix anything it got wrong, then confirm — or throw it away.

It proposes two things and two only: Cause — what you found (customer-facing) and Correction — what you did (customer-facing). Both are ordinary editable boxes, and both labels say where the words end up: on the estimate the customer reads before they approve, and on the invoice they keep. Where the note sounded like it was describing the complaint, it shows that separately under What it heard as the complaint for you to compare against — and says plainly that confirming does not change the concern, because the counter owns that field.

Underneath is the raw transcript in full, never folded away behind a link, labelled with where it came from — heard on the device — no recording was made or recorded and sent to be written down. A draft you cannot check against what was actually said is not reviewable.

Press Confirm — save to the job and the two fields are written and nothing else is. Press Throw this draft away and nothing ever was. Until one of those happens the job is exactly as it was, and the ticket, the estimate and the customer's copy know nothing about it. The audit line records that a person confirmed findings from a voice note.

This is the same rule as everything else the assistant touches — it drafts, you confirm — applied to the one job on the one car.

With no chat model connected

Dictation still works, because the tablet is doing the listening. The drafting step works too, and it is honest about what it is: your own sentences sorted into cause and correction, with nothing rephrased. The card says so — I'm running without a model connected, so this is your own words sorted into cause and correction — not a model's write-up, and nothing was rephrased. Read it over and fix it before you confirm.

The recording fallback is a separate connection. If the shop has one, it can write the recording down and the offline rules still sort those words. If it has none, the recording button is not drawn.

When something goes wrong

Every failure ends in the same place — the typed boxes, which never stop working. The sentences are specific about which failure it was:

• The microphone is blocked for this site. Allow it in your browser's site settings, then tap Dictate again.
• I didn't hear anything. Tap Dictate and speak up.
• That recording is too long. Keep a voice note under a couple of minutes.
• I couldn't reach the model to write that down. Try again in a moment, or type what you found.
• There were no words in that — nothing was drafted.
• I couldn't make a cause or a correction out of that. Say what you found and what you did.

If the shop's plan does not include the assistant, or the assistant is switched off at our end, the block says Dictation is off. and then which of the two it is — and points at the boxes above, which still work.