About notavik
notavik builds documentation software that never takes custody of a patient's recording. The visit is recorded, transcribed and written up entirely on the clinician's own device. We operate no server that receives it, and the business is structured so that we never need to.
What we build
notavik is an AI scribe for clinicians, available on iPhone, iPad and Mac. It records a consultation, produces a transcript with the clinician and patient turns separated, and drafts a structured note in SOAP or narrative form. The clinician edits the draft and moves it into whatever system they chart in.
Speech recognition, speaker separation and note drafting all run on the device's own neural engine. There is no account to create and no backend to connect to. After a one-time download of the speech models, the product works with no network connection at all.
The thesis
Ambient clinical documentation became a category on a cloud assumption: the microphone is in the room, the intelligence is in a data centre. That was the only workable architecture when phones could not run a speech model. It stopped being the only option some time ago — current Apple hardware transcribes a consultation and separates two speakers without asking anyone's server for help.
What kept the cloud in place afterwards was not capability but economics. A server the product must connect to is also a subscription the customer must keep paying, and the per-visit compute cost has to be recovered somewhere. That is why the category prices in three figures a month and sells through enterprise procurement.
Removing the server removes that cost — and with it the entire apparatus built around handling someone else's patient data: the business associate agreements, the retention policies, the breach exposure, the security questionnaires. The privacy position and the price position come from the same architectural decision. They are not two features; they are one.
How the business works
Because there is no marginal cost per visit, notavik does not have to be rented. The free tier covers ten visits a month with every note feature included — not a crippled demo but a usable product. Beyond that there is a subscription for clinicians who prefer one, and a one-time lifetime purchase for those who do not. A one-time price is an honest offer only when the seller has no recurring cost to cover, which is precisely the situation here.
Revenue comes from software sales through the App Store and from nothing else. We do not sell data, we do not run advertising, and there is no enterprise data play waiting behind the consumer product. There is no second business model that the first one is quietly subsidising.
Who it is for — and who it is not
notavik is built for solo clinicians and small practices: people who buy their own tools, who are cost-conscious or privacy-conscious or both, and who have no procurement department to run a vendor review for them. The German-speaking market matters to us specifically, because the objection to uploading patient audio is strongest there.
It is not built for health systems. Enterprise deployments need EHR and FHIR integration, signed agreements and administrative controls, all of which require the server we deliberately do not operate. Clinicians who need those things are better served by one of the cloud vendors, and we would rather say so on this page than waste their evaluation time.
What we will not do
These are constraints on the product rather than aspirations, and each one is checkable from outside:
- We will not transmit a recording, transcript or note. The complete list of destinations the app contacts is printed on the home page and can be confirmed in Apple's App Privacy Report.
- We will not train models on patient data. Nothing of yours reaches us, so there is nothing of yours to train on.
- We will not file a note automatically. Nothing goes to an EHR or anywhere else without a clinician moving it.
- We will not lock notes behind a lapsed subscription. Existing notes stay viewable, editable and exportable regardless of billing state.
- We will not change the privacy position quietly. If any future version ever sent content off the device, it would be published here before release and would require explicit consent in the app.
Who is behind it
notavik is designed and built by Merey Tleugazin and published by Vast Flow. It is a small operation by choice: a product whose whole promise is that no company sits between the clinician and their notes does not need a large one behind it.
One consequence is worth stating plainly. We are not clinicians. notavik makes no clinical claim and takes no clinical decision — it lays out what was said in the structure clinicians already use, and every judgement in the finished note belongs to the person signing it. The promise the product actually makes is an engineering one: that the recording never leaves the device. That is a statement about which code paths exist, it is ours to be accountable for, and it can be tested in about a minute with airplane mode.
The note templates follow the standard SOAP structure because that is the documentation format clinicians already work in — a layout, not a clinical opinion. If something in that structure is wrong for how you practise, we would genuinely like to hear it. A clinician's correction is worth more to this product than any amount of our own guessing.
Contact
Support, privacy questions and press all go to one address, and it reaches the people who build the product rather than an outsourced desk: [email protected]. We aim to answer within two business days.
Further reading: the network ledger setting out every destination the app contacts, the Privacy Policy, and the Terms of Use.