Dictate session notes, treatment plans, and progress reports in the moments between clients. Steno turns your voice into text inside any app on your Mac, so documentation never cuts into your clinical hours.
Therapists are trained to listen, observe, and build rapport. But the administrative reality of modern practice means that for every hour spent with a client, there is often another 20 to 30 minutes spent writing session notes, updating treatment plans, and completing insurance documentation. For a therapist seeing six to eight clients per day, that adds up to two or three hours of writing after the last session ends.
The challenge is uniquely difficult for mental health professionals. Session notes require nuance. You need to capture presenting concerns, clinical observations, therapeutic interventions used, client responses, and plans for next session, all while maintaining appropriate clinical language and avoiding overly detailed personal disclosures. Typing this out from memory after a full day of emotionally demanding work is exhausting, and details inevitably slip away as time passes between the session and the documentation.
Many therapists describe the documentation burden as the single most draining part of their practice. It is not the emotional weight of client work. It is the hours spent at a keyboard afterwards, reconstructing conversations and observations from memory. This is where voice dictation fundamentally changes the equation.
As soon as your client leaves, hold the hotkey and speak your session observations while they are fresh. Describe the presenting concerns, interventions used, client responses, and your clinical impressions. A full progress note that takes ten minutes to type takes under two minutes to dictate. Your notes are done before your next client arrives.
When you need to update goals, objectives, or interventions in a treatment plan, dictate the changes directly into your EHR or practice management system. Steno works in SimplePractice, TherapyNotes, Jane App, or any other platform you access on your Mac. No copying, pasting, or switching between apps.
Initial assessments and psychological reports are among the most writing-intensive documents in therapy practice. Dictating sections like history, presenting problems, mental status observations, and diagnostic impressions dramatically reduces the time spent on these comprehensive documents. The AI transcription engine handles clinical vocabulary accurately.
Communicating with other providers, insurance companies, or referral sources requires clear professional writing. Dictating these letters lets you express your clinical reasoning in a natural, conversational tone. Many therapists find that dictated correspondence reads better than labored typed prose because it captures their authentic professional voice.
Consider the documentation required after a standard 50-minute individual therapy session. Here is what the process looks like with typing versus voice dictation.
| Task | Typing | Voice with Steno |
|---|---|---|
| Session summary | 4 minutes | 1 minute |
| Interventions used | 2 minutes | 30 seconds |
| Client response and progress | 3 minutes | 45 seconds |
| Plan for next session | 1 minute | 15 seconds |
| Total per session | ~10 minutes | ~2.5 minutes |
| Total for 7 sessions/day | 70 minutes | 18 minutes |
That difference of nearly an hour per day means five fewer hours per week spent on documentation. Over a year, that is more than 250 hours returned to your life, your clients, or your practice growth. Use the time savings calculator to estimate the impact for your specific caseload.
Most dictation software is designed for medical or legal professionals and comes with enterprise pricing that does not make sense for a solo practitioner or small group practice. Steno is different. It is a lightweight Mac app that sits in your menu bar, costs a fraction of enterprise dictation tools, and requires zero setup beyond a 30-second installation.
Steno works by inserting text directly at your cursor position using the macOS Accessibility API. This means it works in every application on your Mac without special integrations or plugins. Whether you use a web-based EHR, a desktop practice management tool, or even a simple text document, Steno types your dictated words right where you need them. The setup guide walks through the quick installation process.
Because Steno does not use the clipboard to insert text, it never interferes with your copy-paste workflow. You can dictate a note, then immediately paste assessment scores or intake information you copied earlier. Nothing is overwritten.
Yes. Steno is designed for exactly this workflow. In the five or ten minutes between clients, hold the hotkey, speak your session observations, and release. Your notes appear instantly in whatever application you use for documentation, whether that is an EHR, SimplePractice, TherapyNotes, or a plain text editor.
Steno uses AI transcription trained on broad professional literature, including psychology and psychiatry. It accurately recognizes terms like cognitive behavioral therapy, dialectical behavior therapy, EMDR, psychoeducation, DSM-5 diagnostic categories, and pharmacological terms commonly referenced in treatment plans.
Steno sends audio to a transcription API over encrypted connections. No recordings or transcripts are stored on any server after processing. Audio is discarded immediately after transcription is complete. Steno does not maintain any client records, session logs, or identifiable data on its servers.
Steno is best used between sessions rather than during them, as speaking notes aloud during a session could disrupt rapport. However, some therapists use Steno immediately after a session ends, while the client is leaving, to capture key observations before they fade. The entire dictation process takes under a minute.
Join thousands of professionals who have reclaimed hours from documentation. Steno is free to download for Mac.
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