Short answer: SimplePractice has no built-in dictation button, so use system-wide voice typing instead. Click into any note field, hold your hotkey, speak, release, and the text lands at the cursor. It works in progress notes, treatment plans, and client messages with nothing installed in SimplePractice.
Every clinician in private practice knows the pile. Six sessions today, six notes owed, and by seven in the evening the notes are still a browser tab you have not closed. You are not behind because you do not know what to write. You know exactly what happened in each session. You are behind because getting what you know out of your head and into a text box costs twenty minutes an hour of clinical work, and after a day of listening carefully to people, twenty minutes of typing is the last thing you have energy for.
That is an input problem, not a discipline problem. And the fix is not a better template.
SimplePractice does not have a dictation button
Let us start with the honest part. Open a progress note in SimplePractice and look for a microphone icon. There is not one. SimplePractice is a browser-based practice management system, and its note editor is a set of text fields on a web page. There is no built-in speech input, no dictation toggle in the note composer, and no first-party voice feature you can switch on in Settings.
People often assume there must be one, because they have seen dictation inside other clinical software, or because their phone has a mic key on the keyboard. Neither of those carries over. A microphone button inside another product is a feature of that product. It does not follow you into a SimplePractice note field.
What does follow you is dictation that operates at the operating system level rather than inside one app. That is the whole idea behind system-wide voice typing: instead of every application needing to build its own speech feature, one tool listens when you ask it to and types the result wherever your cursor happens to be. If the cursor is blinking in a SimplePractice note field, that is where the text goes.
The Mac flow
Voice Keyboard Pro lives in the menu bar. The sequence for a progress note is short enough to become automatic within a day:
- Open the client's note in SimplePractice and click into the field you want to fill. This step matters more than it sounds. Text goes where the cursor is, and if the cursor is nowhere, the text has nowhere to land.
- Hold your hotkey.
- Talk through the section the way you would describe the session to a supervisor.
- Release. The text appears in the field.
Nothing is installed inside SimplePractice. There is no browser extension to approve, no integration to configure, no third-party app to connect to your account. From SimplePractice's point of view, text arrived in a field. It cannot tell the difference between text you typed and text you spoke, which is exactly why this works in a system that gives you no hooks.
One setup note: choose a hotkey that does not collide with a browser shortcut. If your hotkey happens to match something Chrome, Safari, or Firefox already uses, the browser will act on the key before you get to speak. Pick something you are not otherwise using and the collision disappears.
The iPhone flow
The SimplePractice mobile app is where a lot of documentation actually gets attempted, usually in the ten minutes between clients or in a parking lot before driving home. Install the Voice Keyboard Pro keyboard, tap into a note field in the app, switch to it with the globe key, and tap the mic button. Speak, and the text goes into the field.
The keyboard needs Full Access to use the microphone. That is an iOS requirement for any third-party keyboard that talks to the network, not something specific to this app, and it is worth understanding rather than tapping past. We wrote a plain explanation of what Full Access does and does not permit in this guide to enabling Full Access on iPhone.
The five places dictation earns its keep
Not every field in SimplePractice deserves your voice. These five do.
1. Progress note narratives
This is the main event. Whatever template you use, the structured parts are quick and the narrative parts are slow. A SOAP note's subjective and objective sections, a DAP note's data and assessment, the interventions and response fields in a template, the plan for next session. Those are prose, and prose is what speech is for.
The trick is not to dictate a note. It is to talk through the session and let the note fall out of it. A structure that works, spoken in order:
- Presentation. How the client arrived, what they reported, what you observed. Observation, not conclusion.
- Focus. What the session actually worked on, in one or two sentences.
- Intervention. What you did, named specifically enough that a reader knows the modality.
- Response. How the client engaged with it, including what did not land.
- Plan. What happens next session, plus anything assigned between sessions.
Five beats. Spoken, that is ninety seconds to two minutes. Typed, the same content is a fifteen-minute job for most people, and it is a fifteen-minute job that competes with the next client. The gap is not a productivity claim, it is arithmetic: adults type at roughly 40 words per minute, and comfortable speech runs 130 to 150.
We covered the broader craft of clinical note-writing by voice in dictation for therapists' session notes, which goes deeper on structure and habit than this per-app guide does.
2. Treatment plans and goals
Treatment plan fields are where writing quality quietly matters, because plans get read by people who are not you. Insurers reviewing medical necessity, a covering clinician, sometimes the client. And they are exactly the fields most likely to get a recycled sentence, because typing an individualized objective for the fourth time in a day is miserable.
Spoken, individualization gets cheap. You can say the actual objective in the actual client's language, with the actual measure attached, in the time it takes to type a generic one. Dictate the goal statement and the objectives as sentences, then go back with the keyboard and set the frequencies, target dates, and any dropdown values.
3. Client messages in the portal
Secure messaging turns into a second job fast. Scheduling changes, between-session questions, homework clarifications, insurance confusion. Most of those replies are three sentences that take three minutes to type because you are typing them between other things.
Two cautions here, both real. First, the tone trap: speech carries warmth that text does not. A sentence that sounded gentle out loud can read flat or clipped on the page, and with a client that is not a small thing. Read every dictated message before you send it. Second, do not answer a message that landed badly in the same sitting you read it. That advice is old and it survives the switch to voice, because voice makes fast replies even faster.
4. Intake and assessment summaries
An intake summary is the longest piece of prose most clinicians write about a client, and it is usually written after a ninety-minute appointment when you are least inclined to write anything long. Speaking it works well because intake content is narrative by nature, presenting concern, history, current functioning, risk screening, initial formulation, and it is easier to say a formulation out loud than to compose one in a text box.
5. Administrative writing that is not clinical at all
Practice documents, cancellation policy text, the wording on your intake forms, an email to a referring provider, the blurb on your practice profile. None of it is clinical documentation, all of it is writing you keep postponing. This is the safest place to start if you want to build the habit before you use voice on anything sensitive.
The rule that keeps voice from creating billing errors
Speak the sentences. Type the values.
Everything in SimplePractice that is a number, a code, or a controlled choice should be entered with the keyboard, every time. That means CPT codes, ICD-10 codes, units, session fees, copay amounts, dates of service, claim fields, and every dropdown or checkbox in the interface.
The reason is specific, and it is not that dictation cannot handle numbers. It is that numeric and code errors are silent. If a dictated sentence comes out garbled, you see it immediately, because garbled prose looks wrong. If a code comes out as a neighboring code, or a fee reads 150 instead of 115, it looks completely normal. It sails past a read-through and shows up weeks later as a denied claim or a billing correction. Prose errors announce themselves; number errors do not.
If you want the full treatment of how spoken digits get turned into written ones, and why the same spoken number can be formatted several ways, see how to dictate numbers and dates. The short version for clinical work is simpler: your voice is for language, your keyboard is for identifiers.
Client names, medications, and instruments: the vocabulary problem
Here is the failure mode that drives clinicians away from dictation in the first week. The sentences come out beautifully and then the client's name comes out wrong. Or an assessment instrument becomes a common word. Or a medication name becomes something that is not a medication.
This is not random. General transcription is optimized for the words people usually say, and clinical practice is full of words people usually do not: surnames from every language, drug names built to be unique, modality acronyms, instrument abbreviations, agency names, the internal shorthand your practice uses for referral sources. Those are rare tokens competing against common ones, and the common one wins.
Voice Keyboard Pro's Smart Vocabulary is the answer to this specific problem. It is a personal dictionary with replacement rules: you tell it the terms you actually use and how they should be written, and it stops guessing. Load the names on your caseload, the instruments you administer, the modalities you practice, the medications you see most often, and the referral sources you write about. The correction burden falls off a cliff, because you have replaced guessing with a rule. We explain how a personal dictionary changes accuracy over time in this post on custom vocabulary.
One judgment call worth naming: your vocabulary list is yours to curate. If you are uncomfortable putting full client names in a dictionary, use initials, first names only, or just the surnames that recur across your caseload. The tool does not require a roster to be useful.
Where your words go, and where that leaves compliance
Clinicians ask about privacy earlier than almost any other audience, and they are right to.
Here is what we can tell you plainly about Voice Keyboard Pro: our server stores only operational pings. No audio, and no transcript content. What you dictate is not accumulating in a file somewhere on our side.
Here is what we will not tell you, because it would not be honest coming from a software vendor: whether that is sufficient for your practice's obligations. Whether a given tool fits into your HIPAA posture, whether you need a business associate agreement in place before using it with protected health information, and what your malpractice carrier or state board expects, are decisions for you and whoever advises you on compliance. We build dictation software. We are not in a position to rule on your practice's regulatory obligations, and you should be skeptical of any vendor who says otherwise in a blog post.
What we can offer is the practical framing. If you have a compliance advisor, the questions to bring them are: where does audio go, is it retained, is transcript content retained, and is a BAA available or required for our use. Those four questions resolve most of it. For the broader picture of how dictation pipelines handle audio, we wrote a full explainer on whether voice to text stores your audio, including how to read a privacy policy in ninety seconds. Clinicians working with the strictest requirements may also want our piece on HIPAA considerations for clinical note dictation on Mac.
Two rules that are not negotiable regardless of what your compliance advisor says: never dictate passwords or portal credentials, and never dictate card or account numbers. Those belong in a password manager and a payment field respectively, not in a speech stream.
A workflow that fits between sessions
The best documentation habit is the one that runs before the next client walks in, because a note written at 6pm about a 10am session is reconstructed rather than recalled.
A version that fits a real day:
- Ninety seconds after the client leaves. Open the note, click into the narrative field, and speak the five beats. Do not stop to fix wording. Do not open another tab.
- Thirty seconds on the values. Type the code, the date, the units, the dropdowns.
- Thirty seconds reading. Read it as written. Not skimmed, read. Then sign or leave it as a draft, per your own policy.
Three minutes per client. Six clients is eighteen minutes across a whole day instead of an evening. That is the entire pitch, and it does not require you to write differently, only to stop typing.
If a session runs long and you cannot document immediately, dictate a holding note in a scratch file, four or five sentences of raw material, and expand it later. Raw material spoken while it is fresh beats a polished note written from memory six hours on.
Writing notes that hold up
Voice makes it easy to produce more words, and more words are not automatically better notes. A few disciplines that matter more once dictation removes the friction:
- Observations, not diagnoses of the moment. Describe what the client said and did. Keep clinical impressions marked as impressions.
- Session content, not everything you know. Speech tends to sprawl. A note is a record of the session, not of your entire understanding of the client.
- Watch for the editorial aside. Spoken thinking includes asides you would never type. Read for them before signing.
- Risk content gets slow, deliberate attention. Anything involving safety planning, mandated reporting, or risk assessment should be written carefully and reviewed carefully, whatever the input method.
None of this is new. It just becomes newly relevant when the cost of producing a paragraph drops to nothing.
On the phone: fixing text without hunting for the cursor
Editing dictated text on a phone is the part everyone hates, because placing a cursor precisely in a mobile text field is genuinely unpleasant. Voice Edit handles this differently: you speak the change you want rather than navigating to it. Say what should be different and the text updates. On a phone, between clients, that is the difference between fixing a note and leaving it wrong.
Practices with multilingual caseloads also have two-way translation available while dictating, across 24 languages. It is useful for correspondence and for practice materials. It is not a substitute for a qualified interpreter in a clinical encounter, and we would not want it read that way.
Frequently asked questions
Does SimplePractice have dictation built in?
No. There is no microphone button in the note editor and no first-party voice input setting. Dictation into SimplePractice comes from the operating system or a keyboard, not from SimplePractice itself.
Do I need admin approval or an integration?
No. System-wide dictation types into whatever field has focus. Nothing is added to your SimplePractice account, no data connection is established between the two products, and there is nothing for an administrator to approve. This is a large part of why it works in software that offers no extension model.
Does it work in the SimplePractice mobile app?
Yes. On iPhone, the Voice Keyboard Pro keyboard works in any app that accepts keyboard input, including SimplePractice. Switch to it with the globe key and use the mic button.
Can I dictate the whole note including the codes?
You can, but do not. Speak the prose and type the codes, fees, dates, and dropdown values. Code errors do not look like errors, which is precisely what makes them expensive.
What about macOS built-in dictation instead?
Built-in dictation will type into a browser field, and for some clinicians it is enough. The limits show up in two places: it does not learn the proper nouns you keep correcting, and you carry the punctuation yourself by speaking every mark. A personal dictionary is the difference, and it is the reason clinicians with heavy specialized vocabulary tend to move off the stock tool.
Is this appropriate for protected health information?
That is a compliance question for your practice, not one a vendor should answer for you in an article. What we can state is our own behavior: operational pings only, no audio stored, no transcript content stored. Take that to whoever advises you on compliance and let them make the call.
The part that actually changes
Clinicians do not leave notes unwritten because they do not care about documentation. They leave them unwritten because the last hour of the day is the worst possible time to do the most cognitively taxing administrative task in the job, and that is when the task always lands.
Moving documentation from typed to spoken does not make you a better writer or a better clinician. It moves the work from the end of the day into the ninety seconds after each session, which is where it always belonged. Voice Keyboard Pro has a free tier with daily limits, and Pro is $4.99 a month or $34.99 a year. Try it on tomorrow's first note and see what your evening looks like.