Fieldcast

I built a tool to turn voice memos into structured bat survey tables.

Talk through your survey as you walk back to the car. Fieldcast transcribes the audio, recognises UK bat species and behaviours, and gives you a clean observation table you can paste straight into your Word report.

Screenshot of a Fieldcast-generated Word document showing a bat activity log with columns for time, species, count, behaviour, location, direction, and notes.

A real Fieldcast output — 30 minutes of voice memo from one of my own dusk emergence surveys, parsed into an editable table and exported as .docx.

Why I built it

I'm a junior ecological consultant in the UK doing bat surveys. The workflow most of us use — handwritten notes in the field, then re-typed into Excel or Word back at the desk — is genuinely painful. You lose detail in the rush. You lose time afterwards. And if you're consolidating notes from a team of four surveyors with different handwriting, you lose your mind.

A photo of my handwritten paper field notes from a bat survey — sideways shorthand on a piece of A4.
My handwritten notes from the same survey. Quick to scribble at dusk, slow to interpret afterwards — especially if someone else wrote them.

I tested Fieldcast against these paper notes on a real bat survey. The auto-generated table matched my own observations almost exactly — and according to my boss (who's been doing this for years), the voice transcript actually captured more detail than I'd written down by hand.

How it works

  1. Record as you survey. Voice memo on your phone — iOS Voice Memos, any recorder. Hands free, no clipboard, no screen.
  2. Upload the audio. Fieldcast transcribes with a model primed on UK bat species, then parses observations into a structured table: time, species, count, behaviour, location, direction, notes.
  3. Review, edit, export. Check any rows that need fixing. Copy the table straight into your Word report, or download as a .docx.

Who this is for

UK ecological consultants doing bat surveys. v1 covers dusk emergence and activity transects, with the same backend ready for PRA, tree PRA, GCN, dormouse, and other UK survey types in the near future. If your hands are full in the field — climbing, holding a torch and binoculars, lifting refugia — Fieldcast is built for you.

About me

W

Will — junior ecological consultant, UK. I built Fieldcast because I got tired of re-typing my own field notes and watching colleagues do the same.

Currently in closed beta with my own consultancy. Looking for two or three other UK bat ecologists to try it on real surveys.

Try it on your next survey

Drop your email and I'll be in touch when there's space in the beta. No marketing, no spam — one email from me when it's ready.

Or open the demo now →