For clients · Switching tools
What is specifically different about Cogent Clinic compared to whichever AI tool came before.
Your clinician may have used a different AI tool with you before, and these tools vary in what they do with your information, so this page covers the four things that are specifically different about how Cogent Clinic handles the writing-up of your session.
AI tools differ in how much of you they actually see.
- 01
Your name does not leave your clinician's device.
Before any session content reaches the AI, your name and personal details are replaced with placeholders such as [PERSON_1] inside your clinician's web browser, so the AI only ever sees the placeholder while your clinician sees both versions and the swap-back happens locally when they read the draft. Many previous-generation AI scribe tools sent your name and content straight to a cloud AI service without that protection.
- 02
Your information stays in the UK and Ireland.
Storage and processing run in UK data centres, live transcription is handled by a service in Ireland, and nothing routes through the United States, which is part of why your clinician chose this tool, since UK clinical data going to US infrastructure raises questions under UK GDPR that some clinicians prefer to avoid.
- 03
Audio is not kept after the session ends.
The transcription provider has a contractual zero-retention agreement with Cogent, which means session audio is not stored beyond the moments needed to produce a transcript, and the transcript itself is then encrypted and saved on your clinician's account where they can delete it at any time.
- 04
Stored notes are encrypted.
Files in the system are encrypted with a key derived from your clinician's password, so without that password nothing inside is readable by anyone, including Cogent itself, and if your clinician resets their password the old files become permanently unreadable, which is deliberate rather than accidental.
If anything does not match what your clinician originally told you, the right person to ask is them.
If anything on this page sits a little differently from what your clinician told you about the previous tool, please bring it up with them, because they will have the original consent paperwork to hand and will be glad to talk you through what has changed, why they made the switch, and what it means for the work the two of you are doing together. The conversation about how your sessions are written up belongs with the two of you, in the room you share, rather than with the tool that helps with the writing afterwards.
And if, after that conversation, you would rather your clinician did not use this tool at all, you can say so, and they can turn it off for your sessions without awkwardness or further explanation.
Last updated 2026-05-13. The full client-facing page is at /for-clients. Detailed legal documentation is in the Trust Centre.
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