No signal in the barn. No free hand. No time between farms. CHIKUWA captures every treatment by voice while you work — the animal ID confirmed off the EID tag, not guessed from audio — then files it once you approve, the moment you get a bar of service.
Dairy, beef, feedlot, swine, and mixed practice. No notes in the truck.
Review queue
200 head · 1 needs you
Ceftiofur HCl · IMM · 72 h milk
Repro check · protocol match
Repro check · protocol match
Off protocol · needs your read
Repro check · protocol match
Original audio kept on every record
Every scribe on the market assumes a quiet exam room, one animal at a time, and a live internet connection. Take any of them into a freestall barn or a feedlot processing chute and they stop working at the gate.
The design
Field records get written twice: once on a glove, a palpation sleeve, or the back of a feed tag, then again at a desk hours later from memory. CHIKUWA removes the second pass entirely.
CHIKUWA is in closed beta. The points above describe how the product is designed to work on an ambulatory food animal route — they are not a guaranteed outcome. What you get out of it depends on your caseload, your workflows, and the record systems you already run.
How it works
Wand the EID tag and the number is read back to you before you say a word — the ID is never inferred from your audio. Then dictate on zero bars, in airplane mode, anywhere between farms. Say the pen instead when the group is the unit.
Every recording is written to encrypted local storage on your phone, bound to the scanned ID, time, and location so nothing is orphaned or attached to the wrong animal.
Back in the truck or within range of the farm office, the queue uploads and transcribes in the background. You do not press anything.
You are done reviewing one animal at a time. CHIKUWA flags only the low-confidence entries and the off-protocol treatments, so you read the handful that got highlighted, play the backed-up audio if you want to hear exactly what you said, and hit approve — a few hundred head into the record in one tap. Approved entries map to that farm's own event codes and never overwrite existing data.
CHIKUWA runs as a native iOS and Android app, not a website in a browser tab. That is what makes offline recording possible: no page to load, no session to lose, and no laptop to carry into the barn.
Core features
A lightweight model runs on the phone itself, so the text comes up on screen the second you stop talking — in a barn with zero bars, not hours later when you find service. And every record keeps the original recording attached to it, so you always have the proof of exactly what you said at the chute. Syncing happens on its own once you are back in range.
Vacuum pumps, barn fans, bawling calves, and a diesel idling ten feet away. Our noise isolation filters out the chaos and captures exactly what you dictate.
The phone stays zipped in your chest pocket, magnet-mounted to the chute, or sitting on the cart. No lanyard, no cord, no earbuds, no headset to knock loose — nothing an animal or a headlock can catch, and nothing to fumble for with a gloved arm shoulder-deep. A wake word opens and closes every record, so you never touch the device at all.
Pair your Bluetooth EID wand and the ID is captured off the tag, never inferred from audio — you only ever dictate the finding. Reading numbers aloud for 300 head is how the wrong cow ends up under withdrawal. No scan, or a scan that disagrees with what you said, and the record is held and flagged instead of quietly filed against a guess. Say “pen 14” or “the whole load” when the group is the real unit.
Set the pen’s protocols once and a repro check moves at its real pace — “preg 60,” “open,” “protocol A” — ten seconds a head, exceptions only. Where CHIKUWA earns its keep is the other end: the DA, the hard dystocia, the lameness workup you would otherwise write up from memory at 9pm. The long narrative nobody has a protocol for.
CHIKUWA drafts into the fields of the records you already keep, including the producer-side herd software, and then stops. You review the record and release it. Entries are mapped to that farm's own event codes and never overwrite existing data — no silent writes into a herd management system on your license.
Records are finished at the chute, not on the road. You pull out of the driveway with that farm already closed out — no notepad on the steering wheel, no dictating at 55 mph, no reconstructing eleven stops from memory at 9pm.
The difference
Most veterinary AI scribes stream audio to the cloud as you speak. That single architectural decision is what fails the moment you drive past the last cell tower.
Recording with zero bars of signal
CHIKUWA
Records and stores locally, always
Cloud-streaming scribes
Needs a live connection to start
Behavior in a dead zone mid-visit
CHIKUWA
Queue keeps building, nothing is lost
Cloud-streaming scribes
Session drops and audio is cut off
Uploading once back in range
CHIKUWA
Automatic background sync
Cloud-streaming scribes
Manual re-recording or re-typing
Consecutive records in one visit
CHIKUWA
Designed for back-to-back records down a chute
Cloud-streaming scribes
One patient, one chart at a time
Record at pen, lot, or group level
CHIKUWA
Native — treat a whole pen in one pass
Cloud-streaming scribes
Individual patients only
Noise floor it is tuned for
CHIKUWA
Vac pumps, barn fans, and bawling calves
Cloud-streaming scribes
A quiet indoor exam room
Operating it with no free hands
CHIKUWA
Wake word only — the device is never touched
Cloud-streaming scribes
Tap the screen to start and stop
Getting the animal ID right
CHIKUWA
EID wand scan, read back to confirm
Cloud-streaming scribes
Whatever the microphone thought it heard
Writing into the producer's herd software
CHIKUWA
Only after you review and release it
Cloud-streaming scribes
No connection to farm-side systems
Structured notes in the record
CHIKUWA
Mapped into your existing fields
Cloud-streaming scribes
Also supported
Questions
If your question is not here, ask it in the demo request and we will answer it directly.
CHIKUWA is in closed beta with a limited number of food animal and mixed practices. Tell us what kind of work you do and we will show you a live demo on your own workflow.