Meeting recaps, client reports, follow-ups - turn voice into deliverables faster
The shape of the day
A management consultant's day is built around two things: client meetings and the documentation that follows them. According to research from Runn and Hacking the Case Interview, managers spend roughly 30-40% of a 50-80 hour week in client meetings, with another 20-30% on team coaching and deliverable review. That leaves the remainder for the actual writing - recaps, decks, reports, proposals, and the steady stream of client emails.
The documentation obligation is structural. Every client meeting generates at least three writing outputs: a recap to the team, a follow-up to the client, and action items for the project plan. There is no meeting that ends without creating something. And unlike internal meetings where you might get away with a quick Slack message, client-facing documentation has to be clear, professional, and fast - because the client's perception of your firm's responsiveness is partly built on how quickly a coherent summary lands in their inbox after you hang up.
Microsoft's 2024 Work Trend Index, drawn from trillions of Microsoft 365 usage signals, found that knowledge workers spend 57% of their time in meetings, email, and chat - and only 43% actually creating. For consultants, the ratio skews further toward documentation because every client touchpoint carries a written record requirement. Billable utilization in consulting averages 67-69% globally, meaning 30-33% of working hours are non-billable admin, writing, and coordination. The writing is the overhead that eats the margin.
Where typing slows you down
The bottleneck is not the meetings. It is the 20-30 minutes after each one.
That window - walking back to your desk, riding the elevator, standing in the parking garage - is when the meeting is freshest and the synthesis is fastest. The stakeholder who drove the decision, the two risks that came up unexpectedly, the client's exact phrasing of what they need by Thursday: all of it is at peak recall in the three minutes after the call ends. But the keyboard is back at the desk, and by the time you sit down, you have two more messages in Slack and the next call starts in fifteen minutes.
So the recap gets written later, from progressively fainter memory. The follow-up email takes longer than it should because you are reconstructing instead of reporting. The action items that felt obvious in the room now require a pause to think through. This is not an individual productivity problem - it is a structural gap between when information density peaks (right after the meeting) and when the keyboard is available.
The same pattern shows up in deliverable drafting. A consultant who has spent a week on-site with a client comes home with a full mental model of the diagnosis. Getting that model from their head into a Word document requires sitting down and typing paragraphs under deadline. Speaking that same content into a voice note takes roughly a third of the time (per Stanford HCI, 2016) and catches details that would otherwise get edited out for efficiency.
McKinsey's research on meeting effectiveness found that 61% of executives say at least half the time they spend in decision-making meetings is ineffective. The output problem compounds the input problem: even effective meetings lose value if the synthesis never gets written down fast enough to act on.
How voice fits this workflow
The clearest win is immediate post-meeting dictation. You walk out of the client call and dictate the recap while the details are still vivid - what was decided, what was deferred, what surprised you, what the client said they need by Friday. You are not writing; you are reporting. The words come faster because you are not composing - you are describing what just happened. That dictation becomes the raw material for both your internal team update and the client follow-up email.
Voice is also useful for client follow-up drafts on the move. You are between meetings, on the way to another office, or heading to the airport. Rather than writing a follow-up email on your phone - two-thumb mobile typing averages around 36-38 words per minute in a large-scale study of 37,000 users (per Aalto University / University of Cambridge / ETH Zürich, 2019) - you dictate the full body of the email and paste it when you get to a desk. Conversational speech runs at roughly 150 WPM (per the National Center for Voice and Speech), roughly 3-4x faster than mobile typing - a ratio confirmed by a Stanford HCI study that found speech input is 3x faster than a smartphone keyboard with a 20% lower error rate. For a 200-word client email, that is the difference between about 80 seconds and roughly 5-6 minutes on mobile glass.
Where voice is NOT the right tool: data tables, slide structure, anything that requires visual layout decisions. Voice does not help you choose where to put a chart in a deck or how to label axis ticks. Use it for prose - recaps, emails, narrative sections of reports, bullet-point lists of takeaways - not for anything that lives in a cell or a shape.
Voice is also not a substitute for real-time meeting transcription. If you need a verbatim record of what was said on the call, that is a different tool entirely (see the tradeoffs section).
AICHE specifically for consultants
AI cleanup on every dictation. When you dictate a meeting recap in the parking garage, you are not speaking in polished paragraphs. You trail off, restart sentences, say "um" three times, and use placeholder phrases like "the thing they mentioned about the budget." AICHE's cleanup pipeline removes the filler words and stutters, adds punctuation and paragraph breaks, and turns the spoken stream into something you would actually send. This happens in roughly 3 seconds for a 15-minute audio clip - you are not waiting.
Custom vocabulary for client and industry terms. Every engagement comes with its own vocabulary: client company names, internal code names for projects, industry acronyms, proprietary frameworks. AICHE lets you add up to 50 custom vocabulary entries that get applied on every transcription. Add "McKinsey-Lilli" once and it will not come out as "McKinsey Lily" or "Mackenzie Lily" or whatever Whisper guesses. Add your client's organization name, the project codename, and the three acronyms that show up in every meeting. They get spelled correctly from that point forward. Custom vocabulary syncs across all your devices, so what you taught AICHE on your Mac is also applied when you dictate on your iPhone.
Cross-device consistency for a cross-device job. Consultants are not at one desk. Monday is a client's office. Tuesday is the airport. Wednesday is home. Thursday is another client site. AICHE runs on macOS, Windows, iPhone, iPad, Apple Watch, and Android - with the same hotkey workflow and the same vocabulary on every surface. A recap you dictate on your Watch syncs to your Mac. A follow-up you draft on your iPhone is in your clipboard ready to paste. The subscription covers up to 10 devices on Pro, so your work laptop, personal Mac, iPhone, and iPad are all in.
Apple Watch for the highest-value capture moment. The three minutes after a meeting ends are the most information-dense. You can tap your Apple Watch and start dictating before you have even reached for your phone. AICHE has no length cap on Watch recordings - you are not limited to a short memo. The audio syncs to your iPhone via WatchConnectivity and gets processed in seconds. No device in hand, no fumbling for the phone.
Offline recording with auto-queue. Consulting involves airports, client basements, buildings with spotty coverage, and the occasional flight where you have three hours with nothing but your thoughts and a laptop with no Wi-Fi. AICHE records offline and queues the audio locally, encrypted on disk. When connectivity returns, the queue processes automatically. You do not lose a recap because the hotel Wi-Fi was down.
Crash-proof save. If you have ever lost a voice memo because your phone died mid-dictation, you understand the specific frustration of trying to reconstruct the same synthesis a second time. AICHE queues audio locally when network outages, app crashes, or subscription lapses interrupt processing. It resumes later when conditions allow.
Honest tradeoffs
AICHE is not a meeting transcription tool. If you need a verbatim record of what was said on a client call - speaker-attributed, timestamped, with a search index - use Otter.ai or Fireflies.ai. These tools join your call, record it, and produce a full transcript of who said what. AICHE does not join calls and does not transcribe audio it was not present for. What AICHE does is help you dictate your own post-meeting synthesis - your words, your framing, captured at peak information density.
Cloud round-trip, not local processing. AICHE sends audio to Groq (a named cloud provider) for processing, discards the audio immediately after processing, within 1 second, and returns clean text. It does not process audio locally on your device. For most consulting work this is fine. For engagements under strict information security policies - think M&A due diligence rooms, litigation support, or clients with data residency requirements that prohibit any third-party cloud contact - check with your engagement lead before using any cloud-based voice tool, including AICHE. AICHE encrypts audio in transit and discards it immediately after processing, within 1 second (iOS and Android additionally use certificate pinning), but "discarded after processing" is still a cloud round-trip.
No in-call recording or compliance integration. If your firm uses Gong or Chorus for call recording and CRM sync, AICHE does not integrate into that workflow. It is a dictation layer, not a call intelligence platform.
Vocabulary cap at 50 entries. If you are deep in an engagement with dozens of proprietary terms and names, 50 entries requires some prioritization. Add the ones that appear most often and would cause the most confusion if misspelled; leave generic industry terms that AICHE handles correctly without coaching.
Desktop UI is English only. The mobile apps (iPhone, iPad, Android) are localized in 28 languages; the macOS and Windows apps are English-interface only. Voice input works in 99 languages on every platform regardless of interface language - so if you dictate in French or Spanish, the transcription works. But the menus and settings on desktop are in English.
What to try first
Monday morning: dictate your next meeting recap on the way back to your desk. Right after a client call, before you open your laptop, press the mic on your iPhone (or tap your Watch) and spend two minutes describing what happened. What was decided, what the client said they need, what you noticed that wasn't on the agenda. Do not try to write a polished document - just talk. AICHE cleans it up. Paste what comes back into your follow-up email draft and see how much of the editing work is already done.
This week: build your client vocabulary list. Open AICHE settings and add the five most common terms from your current engagement - client name, project codename, two or three acronyms. Run one dictation and check whether they come out correctly. Adjust as needed. The 50-entry limit is shared across all devices, so the terms you add are available on your Mac when you are drafting at a desk and on your iPhone when you are in transit.
Next time you draft a narrative section of a deliverable: speak the first draft. Pick a section you know well - the situation analysis, the key findings, the executive summary. Instead of typing, dictate it. You will almost certainly produce more content faster, and you will capture qualifications and caveats that tend to get cut when you are typing under time pressure. Then edit the text like any other draft. The speaking step is just the first draft, not the final product.
Try AICHE
7-day free trial, no credit card required. Personal plan from $3.99/month (annual). Pro adds 10 devices and priority processing.
See pricing and start your trial at aiche.app/pricing
The trial gives you full access across all your devices. Set up the macOS or Windows hotkey, add three custom vocabulary entries for your current engagement, and dictate your next meeting recap before you open your laptop. That is a complete first test in one meeting cycle.