Akoua opens to New Zealand: across the Tasman, no further
From today, New Zealand clinicians can sign up to Akoua. Same product, same pricing, and the same rule we apply to everything else: we’d rather tell you exactly what you’re getting than round it up to something shinier.
So here is exactly what you’re getting.
Where your patients’ data goes (spoiler: not far)
New Zealand organisations run the AU Sovereign profile. That means every consult is processed in Australia — transcription and note drafting on vetted Australian services over private links inside Akoua’s cloud — and your clinical record is stored in Sydney. Speaker identity, including any voice profile, is matched only on Akoua’s own infrastructure and never sent to a provider. Nothing is processed outside Australia without a separate, explicit request for that specific session.
Your patients’ data has the world’s least interesting itinerary: one hop across the Tasman, and that’s the lot. No stopover in the United States, no world tour of global services, and never a side trip into anyone’s training data. Boring by design — it’s the one part of the product where we aimed for boring.
The rest of the privacy design comes with it, unchanged: audio is deleted by default — kept encrypted only while you review, deleted the moment you confirm the note — every access is written to an append-only audit log, sign-in is passkey-first, and the patient can watch the deletion happen and keep a QR receipt. Privacy by design walks through all of it.
An NZ-resident processing region is on our roadmap. It isn’t built yet, so we won’t sell it yet — when your data can stay in New Zealand, we’ll say so in a post like this one.
The honest part
Akoua’s clinical tuning is Australian today. The drug vocabulary is PBS/AMH and the letters are RACGP-aware. MBS billing hints are Australian-only, so New Zealand organisations simply don’t see them — item numbers from the wrong country aren’t a feature. Much of the rest carries across the Tasman well — the notes, the flags, the letters, the uncertainty handling are the product, and they don’t care which side of the ditch you practise on. But we haven’t built NZ-specific vocabulary or billing, and our speech benchmarks are built on synthetic Australian-accent consult audio — we haven’t published New Zealand–accent numbers, and we won’t imply them.
If that trade-off doesn’t work for your practice, we’d rather you knew before you signed up. If you sign up and something New Zealand–shaped trips it up, tell us — that’s precisely the feedback that decides what gets built next.
What it costs
The same as it costs in Australia: founders pricing at A$79/month, billed in AUD and locked in for as long as your subscription stays active; practice plans run A$89–109 per clinician per month. GST applies to Australian customers only, so New Zealand organisations pay the listed figure. Every plan is the full product — no feature gates, no tiers of honesty. The pricing page has the detail.
What Akoua is, and isn’t
For readers meeting us for the first time: Akoua is a private AI medical scribe. It listens to a consented consultation, transcribes it in near real time, and drafts a structured note from only what was said — flagging anything it wasn’t sure it heard instead of guessing. You review and confirm before anything is saved. It runs on the web, Windows, Mac, iPhone and Apple Watch, and Android, with one account across all of them.
And the line that never moves: Akoua is a documentation aid, not a diagnostic device. It makes no clinical inferences, and every draft needs your explicit review and confirmation.
Haere mai. Sign up today, read how the two sovereignty profiles work first — or, if you’re weighing up scribes in general, start with what to look for in a secure AI scribe in New Zealand.