Turning Site-Visit Notes Into a Clear Written Quote

Your notes are the only record of what you saw. Treat them as the truth, and treat the draft as a rewrite of them. If a detail isn't in your notes, it shouldn't appear in the quote.

Get the notes into text first

Voice memos need turning into words before a writing tool can use them. Speech recognition, also called speech-to-text, turns what people say into written text.¹

Phones and apps do this, and the results vary. Background noise, echoes and the way a recording was made can all distort speech.¹ A memo recorded in a roof space with a drill going next door will come out rougher than one recorded in the van.

So read the transcript before you do anything else. Look for:

• Wrong words that sound alike.
• Room names that got mangled.
• Numbers that are missing or look wrong, like circuit counts or measurements.

Fix those in the transcript, not in the draft. Otherwise the error gets copied into the quote.

Mark what you don't know

This step stops most invented details. Where your notes have a gap, write the gap down, such as "ceiling height not recorded" or "switchboard photo not taken".

An AI tool tends to fill gaps with something that reads well. That's a known failure, where a tool gives false information as if it were fact.² If you list the gaps and tell the tool to leave them as open questions, you've given it nothing to fill.

Tell the tool what the quote is for

Maker guidance says that giving context or motivation behind your instructions can help a tool give more targeted answers.³

For a quote, that means saying:

• Who reads it: a homeowner, a landlord, a builder.
• What you want back: a short description of the work, room by room, in plain English.
• What to avoid: don't add work I didn't mention, don't add prices, don't add technical claims.
• What to do with gaps: list them as questions at the end.

Leave prices out of the first pass. Add your own figures after, by hand. The tool doesn't know your costs, and this site doesn't give pricing advice.

Here's a prompt shape you could adapt. It's a pattern, not a magic phrase:

Here are my notes from a site visit. Write a plain-English description of the work for the customer, room by room. Use only what's in the notes. Don't add anything. If something seems missing, list it as a question at the end. Don't include prices.

Compare the draft with the notes

Put the two side by side. Go through the notes line by line and tick each item off in the draft. Then go through the draft and check that every sentence traces back to a line in the notes.

Going wrong looks like this: the notes say "replace two downlights" and the draft says "replace all downlights". It's one small word, and the customer will hold you to it.

Customer details

Take names, phone numbers and full addresses out of what you paste in, then add them back by hand. Your country's privacy body has the official word on what you may enter into a tool, so look there first. For the last read before sending, there's a short checklist for AI-drafted quotes on its own page.

Keep the originals

Save the raw notes and the voice memo with the job. If a customer disputes the wording later, you'll want to see what you actually recorded. Next, the draft needs a clear statement of what's in and out; see how to word scope.