The use of AI in primary care is no longer an emerging idea, it’s a growing reality. Against a backdrop of rising patient demand, workforce challenges and growing documentation burdens, GP surgeries are increasingly exploring AI-driven tools to support their teams. Among these, voice-enabled AI tools that can listen, transcribe and summarise consultations are fast becoming one of the most talked-about solutions.
But as use cases accelerate, so too must our focus on safety, transparency and governance. NHS England’s guidance on ambient voice technology (AVT) sets a clear direction: if AI is to be embedded into patient care, it must be rigorously assessed, clinically validated and transparently implemented. Let’s explore what safe use of voice-enabled AI looks like in practice and how we are committed to meeting this standard.
Meeting the NHS standard for AVT safety, compliance and governance
In June 2025, NHS England released a Priority Notification detailing the safety and assurance requirements for AVT. These include:
- DSPT completion and DTAC compliance across all five pillars (clinical safety, data protection, cybersecurity, interoperability and usability)
- Clinical Safety Officer oversight
- UK GDPR adherence and end-to-end encryption, zero retention of patient data without a purpose
- MHRA Class I medical device status as a minimum for any AI that performs summarisation
These standards are now the minimum requirement for any vendor operating in the AVT space. But meeting the letter of the guidance is not enough. Safe implementation requires a shared commitment to good governance across suppliers, commissioners and providers.
At X-on Health, our voice-enabled AI assistant Surgery Intellect is built to meet this standard. Backed by TORTUS technology that is NHS DTAC and DSPT compliant and has UKCA Class I Medical Device status with the MHRA, with Class IIa in progress, Surgery Intellect meets the highest standards for safety and compliance in care settings.
Read in full: Surgery Intellect’s compliance with NHS England AVT requirements, including core platform assurance, enhanced requirements and clinical threshold benefits.
Designing AVT for trust: The role of usability, transparency and data control
For any AVT solution to be safe, it must also be usable. NHS England highlights that user-centred design, clear onboarding and workflow compatibility are essential for sustainable adoption1. That means tools must be designed for the environments in which they’ll be used, from the consulting room to the reception desk, without adding friction or risk.
Surgery Intellect has been developed with this principle in mind. It will be embedded into the X-on Health Phonebar, enabling GPs to launch it in real time during phone consultations, or to handle voicemail and reception interactions. The solution will be available to those already using the Phonebar within Surgery Connect and those using an alternative phone system, with our agnostic Phonebar. This ensures total consultation coverage, including nearly a quarter that takes place over the phone each month (HTN, 2023)2.
Deployment design also means ensuring AVT supports, rather than disrupts, existing clinical and administrative workflows. This includes intuitive user access, lightweight onboarding for teams and technical interoperability systems. Every interaction is shaped by our commitment to reduce, not add to, practice workload.
What sets Surgery Intellect apart is its safety-first approach to AI validation. TORTUS has developed CREOLA (Clinical Review of LLMs and AI), a structured evaluation method that reviews AI summaries for hallucinations, omissions and clinical accuracy. This framework for evaluating clinical safety represents one of the most robust methods for assuring AI-generated content in healthcare, helping to build trust in the industry.
Trust also depends on data stewardship. In healthcare, this must be built in from the start. Our in-house clinical safety specialists are working diligently to ensure that our AI deployments meet and exceed the highest NHS standards. We have added a further layer of assurance by enlisting Curistica as a third-party to independently triple-check our work. This collaboration brings rigorous governance to the heart of every deployment, ensuring that GP practices can adopt AI tools like Surgery Intellect and Surgery Assist with the confidence that compliance is built in, not added on.
By embedding secure-by-design principles, limiting the collection of identifiable data and operating within a secure UK-based infrastructure, we’re actively aligning with NHS expectations on privacy, security and accountability from day one. Adopting a governance-informed approach ensures that as the pace of AI innovation accelerates, safety and compliance remain firmly in step. This supports both clinical confidence and public trust, and reflects X-on Health’s broader commitment to build technology that simplifies care, not complicates compliance.
What AVT safety looks like at the point of care
While compliance frameworks set the foundation and it is key that practice managers can navigate governance issues around transcription technology, clinical safety is also determined by how AVT tools are used in practice. Documentation in electronic health records has been described as one of the key contributing factors causing burnout amongst clinicians (Dymek et al, 2021)3. That’s why Surgery Intellect has been designed with the clinician at its core; listening passively, transcribing accurately and generating structured summaries that support clear, high-quality record keeping.
Surgery Intellect operates using a human-in-the-loop model, in this case the clinician. During consultations, whether face-to-face or by phone, it generates summaries that the GP can review, edit and approve before they are filed into the record. This ensures the clinician remains in full control of the final documentation, aligning with GMC guidance and NHS assurance expectations. The result is more than transcription; it’s clinically coded, structured documentation that ensures clarity and consistency of care with ambient scribes.
In practice, early users of Surgery Intellect report being more present during consultations, with fewer notes to complete after hours. Some GP users have reported saving an average of four minutes per consultation—time they can reinvest in patient care while gaining confidence that their notes are consistent, clinically accurate and securely handled.
Safe use of AVT as a discipline, not a destination
Safe use of AVT in healthcare is not a checklist, it’s an ongoing responsibility. It requires vendors to build technology that works within the clinical, ethical and legal boundaries of the NHS. It asks commissioners to demand rigour, not just innovation. It means supporting clinicians with tools that make their work safer, not harder.
Voice-enabled AI has real potential to transform how general practice operates, from documentation and triage to patient follow-up and care planning. But this potential is only realised if we build it safely, deploy it thoughtfully and keep the human-in-the-loop.
At X-on Health, we’re proud to contribute to this future not through promises, but through practice.
Interested in learning more?
Reach out to discuss how voice-enabled AI can safely support your practice workflows.