I Use an AI Note-Taker in My Therapy Practice. Here's Why I'm Building Something Different.

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I'll be upfront: I use SimplePractice's AI note-taking feature in my own practice.

It's helpful. It reduces the after-session documentation load, and there's something genuinely useful about not having to retype everything from scratch. But I still spend time refining the notes — editing the information, adjusting the tone, making sure what it produced actually reflects what happened clinically. It's a starting point, not a finished product.

And if I'm honest, I've been wanting to move away from it. Not because it doesn't work — it does — but because it doesn't quite feel like me in the documentation. I wanted something more relational. More traditional, in the way that matters.

That discomfort is what eventually pushed me to build Practice Pad.

The appeal of AI note-taking is real, and it makes sense

I don't think therapists who use AI recording tools are wrong to do so. The appeal sits right at the intersection of a few legitimate problems:

The efficiency of EHR systems over paper files. The frustration of double work — handwriting notes in session, then retyping them into a digital system. And the genuine clinical value of staying fully present with a client instead of dividing attention between the person and a keyboard.

That's a real solution to a real problem.

Where I land on it — and why I wanted a different bridge

Here's the distinction I keep coming back to: with AI recording and transcription, the AI is listening and interpreting. It's making decisions about what to capture, how to frame what was said, what rises to the level of a clinical note.

That's the therapist's job. And I don't think a recording — however sophisticated — can replace the clinical judgment that goes into deciding what gets documented and how.

I've typed notes in sessions too. It helps with the efficiency problem, but it introduces a different one: it can feel impersonal. Clients notice when you're facing a screen. The keyboard creates distance.

Handwriting in session is different. It reads as presence — a clinician being attentive, jotting something down the way a person would in a thoughtful conversation. But handwriting creates its own problem: you still have to get those notes into a digital system somehow. Either you scan paper, or you retype everything later. That's the double work problem in its original form.

Practice Pad is what I built to bridge those two things. You handwrite with Apple Pencil during or after session. The app converts it to text on your iPad — nothing leaves your device during that process. The finished note syncs to your own Google Drive, or you copy it into SimplePractice or whatever EHR you use.

Where AI fits — and where it doesn't, for me

I do plan to integrate AI into Practice Pad — but for a specific and limited purpose: improving the accuracy of handwriting-to-text conversion, and potentially helping refine the note quality after it's been written.

That's meaningfully different. The AI isn't in the room. It isn't listening. It isn't interpreting the session. The therapist writes the note — their words, their clinical judgment. The AI just helps make the mechanical conversion more accurate, and helps polish what the clinician has already decided to document.

It's a tool in service of the clinician. Not a replacement for what the clinician does.

I don't think there's one right answer here for every therapist. AI recording tools work for a lot of people, and I understand why. But for me — and I suspect for therapists who are handwriting-native and want their documentation to stay in their own orbit — there's a different path worth building.

That's what I'm building.

Also worth reading: Apple Pencil for Therapy Notes: Why Handwriting Still Works in a Digital Practice

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