Three ways
to do this. We picked the hardest one.
Mentalyc, Upheal, and Heidi all do roughly the same thing — record the session, send it to a cloud, draft the note, return it under a BAA. Bryl does the same thing without the cloud step. That single difference is the entire pitch.
| Feature | Bryl | Mentalyc | Upheal | Heidi |
|---|---|---|---|---|
| Audio leaves device | ✗ | ✓ | ✓ | ✓ |
| Transcript leaves device | ✗ | ✓ | ✓ | ✓ |
| Notes leave device | ✗ | ✓ | ✓ | ✓ |
| BAA required | Not applicable — no PHI shared | Yes | Yes | Yes |
| On-device transcription | ✓ | ✗ | ✗ | ✗ |
| On-device drafting | ✓ | ✗ | ✗ | ✗ |
| EHR push | Manual paste | API + paste | API + paste | API + paste |
| Solo entry price (USD/mo) | $29 | $39–$79 | $59–$99 | $0–$49 (freemium) |
| HIPAA posture | Architectural — no PHI processed off-device | BAA-only | BAA-only | BAA-only |
Three more cloud scribes, same shape.
Blueprint, Eleos Health, and Twofold are also pitching therapists. They make the same architectural choice as the big three — record, upload, draft in the cloud, return under a BAA. The shape of the trade-off is identical.
| Feature | Bryl | Blueprint | Eleos Health | Twofold |
|---|---|---|---|---|
| Audio leaves device | ✗ | ✓ | ✓ | ✓ |
| On-device transcription | ✓ | ✗ | ✗ | ✗ |
| On-device drafting | ✓ | ✗ | ✗ | ✗ |
| BAA required | Not applicable — no PHI shared | Yes | Yes | Yes |
| Primary ICP | Solo psychotherapists | Therapy + measurement-based care | Behavioral health groups + payers | Therapy + general behavioral health |
BAAs are paperwork
around a problem.
A Business Associate Agreement is a contract that says “if your patients' data leaks from our servers, we owe you something.” It does not stop the data from being on those servers. The audio of a couples session, the transcript of an EMDR processing block, the draft note about a client's suicidal ideation — under every cloud-scribe model, all three exist somewhere outside the room they were recorded in. The BAA is a mitigation for a risk the architecture chose to take.
Until recently, that risk was unavoidable. Whisper-grade transcription needed a server-class GPU. Note generation needed a frontier model. Neither fit on a phone. That changed in the last twelve months: Parakeet TDT v3 transcribes faster than real-time on an iPhone 15 Pro, and Apple's Foundation Models drafts a SOAP note in seconds without leaving the device. The cloud step that justified every cloud-scribe's architecture is no longer technically necessary. It is a habit, now. Habits are easier to keep than to break.
The trade we made shows up in one place: there is no API push to your EHR. After the note drafts, you copy it and paste it into your chart. That is one extra action per session, and it is the privacy guarantee. An app that pastes itself into your EHR has, by definition, an authenticated handle on your EHR — which means your charts and Bryl's servers are connected, which means there is something to subpoena. The paste keeps the boundary clean. Therapists in beta tell us it takes about six seconds and they stopped noticing it after a week.
We think this category is two years from a regulator-led reckoning. State licensing boards are starting to ask hard questions about cloud scribing in mental health, plaintiffs' attorneys are starting to notice, and one well-publicized breach will change the default expectation overnight. Building local now is cheaper than retrofitting later — and any team that has to retrofit will be retrofitting against an installed base of patient records that already left the device. We'd rather start from the harder architecture and earn the workflow back than start from the easier workflow and lose the architecture.
Your evening,
back where it belongs.
One paste into the EHR. No 9 PM charting. Audio never leaves your phone. Five sessions free, then $29 a month.