Canadian medicine has a documentation problem the US vendors who dominate the AI-scribe market rarely think about: a meaningful share of Canadian physicians document in one language and discharge patients in another, every single day. A francophone patient in Moncton, an anglophone chart in Montreal, a Punjabi-speaking grandmother in Surrey — the note and the patient handout routinely need to exist in different languages, and today the translation layer is the physician, unpaid, at the end of the visit.
The two questions Canadian clinics are actually asking
If 2024–2025 was Canada's AI-scribe honeymoon — provincial pilot programs, generous free promotions, rapid adoption in family practice — 2026 is the year of sober second thought. Clinics re-evaluating their tools this summer keep landing on the same two questions.
Where does the audio go? Canadian colleges, the CMPA, and provincial privacy commissioners have all published guidance on AI scribes, and the consistent thread is data stewardship: what leaves the room, where it's processed, what's retained, and whether patients were told. These are fair questions with unfashionably concrete answers. Ours: tebIQ's free tier runs dictation on the device itself — the audio never leaves your phone. For cloud features, the standing policy is the same sentence we publish everywhere: encrypted in transit and at rest (AES). Never used for training. Never sold. Whatever scribe you choose, a vendor who can't answer the where-does-the-audio-go question in one diagram hasn't earned a Canadian clinic's charts.
What does it cost when the promotion ends? Several Canadian cohorts have now lived the difference between free-as-product and free-as-promotion. No judgment — subsidized launches are how this industry works — but the lesson stands: evaluate the price you'd pay in month thirteen, not month one, and prefer vendors who publish it.
The bilingual discharge, concretely
Here's the workflow tebIQ built for the Canadian case. You see the patient and document normally — dictate in English or French (input works in 14 languages). The note is generated in your chart language. Then discharge instructions are generated in the patient's language — French and English from the same visit, without writing anything twice — covering what was found, what to do, and when to return.
Why this matters more than it sounds: discharge comprehension is a patient-safety issue, not a convenience. A patient who can't read their return precautions doesn't have return precautions. Every bilingual clinician has done this translation manually a thousand times; it's precisely the kind of mechanical, repeatable work software should have absorbed years ago. And it compounds — the clinic that discharges thirty patients a day in two languages recovers real minutes per visit, which is the only currency that matters at 17:45 on a Friday.
What we'd tell a Canadian clinic evaluating scribes this summer
- Ask the audio question first, in writing, of every vendor.
- Test French dictation and French discharge output with your own voice and your own case mix — accented and bilingual speech is a known weak point across the category, so trust your trial, not the demo.
- Check the month-thirteen price.
- Confirm your college's and the CMPA's current guidance on patient notification — consent practices for ambient recording are your obligation, not the vendor's.
We built the bilingual path because Canadian users asked for it, plainly and repeatedly. If your clinic lives between two languages, this one's for you.
Try the free tier — on-device dictation, no time limit — at tebiq.com.