Built by a doctor who wanted notes he could trust.
Akoua exists because of two objections that kill every scribe conversation in an Australian tea room: I can't trust what it writes, and I can't trust where the audio goes. Both are fair. A fluent note with an invisible error is worse than no note at all, and "trust us, it's private" is not something you can say to a patient.
So Akoua was built backwards from those objections, by a practising doctor. It flags what it isn't sure it heard instead of guessing. It writes [ not stated ] instead of something plausible. It grounds every sentence to the transcript, and saves nothing until the clinician confirms it. And its privacy is designed to be demonstrated — audio processed in Australia, deleted by default the moment you confirm, with a QR receipt the patient keeps.
It's an Australian product in the boring, practical ways: PBS drug names, MBS item hints, RACGP-shaped letters, Australian Privacy Principles, Australian data residency, and for United Kingdom organisations a UK region handled in line with UK GDPR. Made in South Yarra, Victoria.
Dr Tyson K, founder
Junior doctor at a major Melbourne hospital. Before that, twelve years as an en-route air traffic controller at Melbourne Centre.
My instructors said it every day: if it isn’t written down, you won’t remember it right. The whole job was built on that. Nothing lived in a controller’s head. Flight levels, routings, estimates, the time a pilot had to report in safely by — all written down as they happened, cross-checked, and marked off when done. Every instruction was read back and confirmed before anyone acted on it, because one number heard wrong was too expensive to leave to memory.
Then I retrained as a doctor and watched a colleague talk with a patient for twenty minutes, write nothing, and type the whole consultation up at the end of the shift. I still read back — I’ll ring a registrar about insulin dosing and repeat every number before I hang up — but I know my own memory drops things off a list by five o’clock.
Akoua came from a 3am shift, checking a machine-written note that read well and was wrong for that patient. Your brain wants to be reassured by a page that looks right. So the doubts aren’t hidden; they’re the first thing on the page, and nothing is saved until you’ve confirmed it. It writes down what was said in the room. It doesn’t decide anything, and it doesn’t suggest things I never said. The day it confidently wrote a drug I hadn’t mentioned, I’d switch it off.
Two things I’d ask of you: look at your patient more than your notepad, and don’t leave the notes until quarter to five.
Questions about how Akoua handles a consultation go to hello@akoua.ai — read by the people who make Akoua, me included.
A flag you check in five seconds beats an error you never see. We'd rather show you a doubt than a wrong note.
Deletion by default, live checks in the room, an append-only audit trail. Claims a sceptic can verify.
Every number we publish carries its qualifier, and we publish our methodology. No logo walls, no invented testimonials.
Judge it by its flags.
Akoua is open. Individuals and two-seat practices get 14 days free — card required, cancel anytime; practices of three or more clinicians are charged from day one. Founders pricing — A$79/month + GST — is held for as long as your subscription stays active.