ENT dictation software for clinic notes, hearing and balance findings, and operative reports

Otolaryngology notes cover a lot of ground in one day: a sinus follow up, a dizzy patient, a child with ear effusions, a neck mass, a voice complaint and two operative reports. Each one has words a general dictation tool was never built for, such as "tympanoplasty", "cholesteatoma" or "sphenopalatine artery ligation". If you searched for ENT dictation software, otolaryngology dictation software or ENT voice recognition software, this is what VoicePrivate does for that work and what it does not do.

Notes otolaryngologists dictate with VoicePrivate

VoicePrivate is for the notes you write yourself. These are the ENT note types it handles in any text field:

Clinic notes

History, head and neck exam, nasal endoscopy or laryngoscopy findings, assessment and plan for rhinosinusitis, otitis media, tinnitus, epistaxis, anosmia or a neck mass.

Hearing and balance findings

Audiogram and tympanometry summaries, a 4000 Hz notch, positional testing such as the Dix-Hallpike test, and the plan for vertigo or Meniere disease.

Operative reports

Septoplasty, turbinate reduction, tonsillectomy and adenoidectomy, tympanoplasty, mastoidectomy, thyroidectomy and parotidectomy.

Sleep and airway

Obstructive sleep apnea consults, CPAP intolerance and hypoglossal nerve stimulation discussions.

Letters

Referral replies, letters back to the primary care physician and prior authorization narratives.

ENT terms VoicePrivate already knows

The VoicePrivate Healthcare dictionary stores each ENT term with the spellings and abbreviations it maps to that term. A sample from the ENT list:

Source: src/data/healthcare-dictionary.json in the VoicePrivate app source, which holds 673 ent terms, counted October 2026.

ENT words general dictation gets wrong, and what VoicePrivate writes

General speech recognition hears an ENT procedure name as two ordinary words or a phonetic guess. The VoicePrivate Healthcare dictionary corrects these near misses toward the real term. A few from its ENT entries:

• "tympanoplastee" or "tympano plasty" to tympanoplasty
• "mastoidectamy" or "mastoid ectomy" to mastoidectomy
• "septoplastee" or "sept aplasty" to septoplasty
• "laryngoscapee" to laryngoscopy
• "tonselectomy" or "tonsillectamy" to tonsillectomy
• "adnoidectomy" to adenoidectomy
• "parotidectamy" to parotidectomy

What choosing ENT / Otolaryngology does in VoicePrivate

On Mac, open Settings in VoicePrivate and set the Medical specialty to ENT / Otolaryngology. Recognition is then primed with its core terms: rhinosinusitis, septoplasty, turbinate, nasal polyps, ethmoid, maxillary, tympanometry, audiogram, cholesteatoma, tympanoplasty, mastoidectomy, otitis media, tinnitus, vertigo, Meniere disease, tonsillectomy, adenoidectomy, laryngoscopy, vocal fold, leukoplakia, dysphagia, thyroidectomy, parotidectomy, sleep apnea, CPAP, hypoglossal nerve, epistaxis and anosmia. A long misheard word that is a near miss of one of those terms is matched to it first. On Windows there is no picker and the full medical dictionary is used for every note. Either way, all 673 ENT terms and every other specialty's terms stay available. The VoicePrivate specialty index lists the vocabulary size for every specialty in the app.

Example: a VoicePrivate ENT note for positional vertigo

The American Academy of Otolaryngology Head and Neck Surgery Foundation's clinical practice guideline on benign paroxysmal positional vertigo (2017 update) says clinicians should diagnose posterior canal BPPV when the Dix-Hallpike maneuver provokes vertigo with torsional, upbeating nystagmus, treat it with a canalith repositioning procedure, and reassess within 1 month. That is the note below. In VoicePrivate you click into each field of the note, press the hotkey, speak, and press the hotkey again. The text is pasted when you stop.

1. History: press Command+Shift+Space (Ctrl+Shift+Space on Windows) and say: "Brief episodes of spinning vertigo for 2 weeks when rolling to the right in bed, each lasting under 1 minute. No hearing change, no tinnitus, no aural fullness." Press the hotkey again.
2. Exam: press the hotkey and say: "Dix-Hallpike test positive on the right with torsional, upbeating nystagmus after a latency of a few seconds. Left side negative. Tympanometry type A both ears." Press the hotkey again.
3. Procedure: press the hotkey and say: "Canalith repositioning procedure performed for right posterior canal BPPV. Patient tolerated it well." Press the hotkey again.
4. Plan: press the hotkey and say: "No postural restrictions. Reviewed fall risk and recurrence. Reassess within 1 month, sooner if symptoms persist." Press the hotkey again.

Getting ENT notes from VoicePrivate into your EHR

VoicePrivate pastes through the clipboard and then puts back what you had copied, so there is nothing to install inside the EHR. It works in any text field that accepts a paste, including the EHRs and web portals ENT practices use. If your EHR runs in Citrix or another remote desktop, the session must allow clipboard redirection from your computer. The VoicePrivate EHR dictation guide covers the common setups.

ENT notes repeat a lot of text: a normal head and neck exam, standard post-tonsillectomy instructions, a CPAP counseling paragraph. Text shortcuts in VoicePrivate expand a short phrase into that full paragraph, which you then edit for the patient in front of you.

Recorded dictation and audio files in VoicePrivate

If you dictate on a handheld recorder between cases, VoicePrivate can transcribe the saved file on your computer. It imports WAV, MP3, M4A, FLAC, OGG and AAC files, plus WMA on Windows. Olympus .dss and Philips .ds2 recorder files have to be saved as WAV or MP3 with the recorder's own software first.

On-device facts for VoicePrivate ENT dictation

Speech is processed on the Mac or Windows PC that runs VoicePrivate. Audio never leaves that computer, and nothing is sent to a cloud service for transcription. VoicePrivate does not record the visit: it listens only between your two hotkey presses, and text is pasted when you stop, not typed live while you talk. With Auto-save transcriptions on, which is the default, each dictation is also kept in the app's Library on that computer. Turn it off in Settings if you want the EHR to hold the only copy.

ENT voice recognition software: how VoicePrivate differs from cloud dictation and scribes

Most medical speech recognition sold to ENT practices runs as a cloud service: your audio goes to the vendor's servers and text comes back. Ambient scribes go further and listen to the whole visit, then draft the note. VoicePrivate does neither. You dictate the note, recognition runs on your own computer, and you stay the author of every sentence. If you are weighing a switch from Dragon, the Dragon Medical One vs VoicePrivate comparison covers price, platforms and where each one processes speech.

Built-in tools are free: Windows 11 has voice typing (Windows key + H) and macOS has Dictation. Neither comes with a medical dictionary, so ENT procedure names and eponyms need fixing by hand. That correction time is what a specialty dictionary saves.

VoicePrivate Healthcare Edition price for ENT practices

VoicePrivate Healthcare Edition is $297 a year or $34.99 a month per clinician, and the ENT vocabulary is included with every other specialty. There is no free trial. Individual monthly and annual plans have a 30-day money-back guarantee on the first payment. ENT groups of 2 to 20 clinicians can buy team seats at $267 per seat per year, billed at purchase. Full details are on the Healthcare Edition pricing page.

ENT dictation FAQ

ENT work overlaps with other VoicePrivate specialty pages: speech-language pathology dictation for swallow studies and voice therapy, surgical dictation for thyroid and parathyroid operative reports, oncology dictation for head and neck cancer consults and pediatrics dictation for ear infection follow ups.