Voice Notes and Photo Analysis: What Is Sent Where
Exactly what leaves BranchSite when a photo is analysed or a voice note is transcribed, who can see it, and how to turn either off.
Two Tree Inventory features send something to an AI model: photo analysis and voice notes. This page says precisely what, so you can answer a client who asks.
The short version
| Feature | What leaves BranchSite | What comes back |
|---|---|---|
| Photo analysis | One tree photo, as a temporary link the model can open for a few minutes | A proposed species, condition, defects and size estimates |
| Voice notes | The audio clip, then the text it became | A proposed species, condition, defects and size estimates |
No client name, address, contact, price or invoice is ever part of either request. Neither feature sends your tree list, your job, or anything about the property.
Where it goes
Both requests go out through the AI Gateway on BranchSite's own account — the same route the Assistant uses. Your company does not need an account with a model provider and never holds a key.
- Photo analysis and the wording step of a voice note use BranchSite's standard structured-output model (an Anthropic Claude model by default; an owner-configured deploy may set another).
- Transcription — turning the clip into text — uses a dedicated speech-to-text model (an OpenAI transcription model by default).
The model that actually served each request is recorded on the proposal, so if the gateway fell back to a different one you can see which.
For how BranchSite treats model providers in general — including zero-data-retention routing, which an owner can require under Settings → Assistant → Privacy — see What the assistant can see. With zero-data-retention required, only models that keep no prompts or outputs are used.
Where the files live
Photos go to a private tree-photos store and audio clips to a private tree-audio store. Neither is public: every view is a signed link that expires, and the link handed to the model is short-lived for exactly that reason. Both are scoped to your company — nobody outside it can read either, and the client portal shows only what you publish to it.
An audio clip is capped at three minutes and is kept with the tree's journal entry alongside its transcript, so you can play back what was actually said.
A model never changes a tree
This is the rule the whole feature rests on. Both features produce a proposal — a card of suggested values with a confidence on each. Nothing reaches the tree record until a person opens it and presses Confirm, and only the fields that person ticked are written. Dismissing leaves the tree exactly as it was.
Values a person accepted unchanged are marked as estimates. Values they typed or edited carry no mark, because they are not estimates. Reports, PDFs and the client-facing proposal map print confirmed values only — a proposal is never published.
BranchSite does not estimate a tree's age from a photo or a recording. An age nobody cored is a number a client would read as measured.
Turning them off
An owner controls both in Settings → Features:
- Photo analysis off — no photo ever leaves BranchSite. Capture, the journal and the map are unchanged.
- Voice notes off — no hold-to-talk button, and no audio is ever recorded or sent.
Crews can also switch photo analysis off for themselves for a session: on the capture screen, tap Analyse photos automatically. Captures continue exactly as before; only the suggestions stop.
What it costs
Both features are metered against your company's AI allowance, and photo analysis has a daily cap so a single long property cannot spend the month. Owners see the per-feature split — and the field-capture counts for the last 30 days — under Settings → Assistant → Usage.