Best AI Medical Scribes and Copilots in 2025: Complete Comparison & Buyer’s Guide for Clinicians

In 2025, AI medical scribes have evolved far beyond simple note-taking tools. Once used mainly to transcribe patient encounters, today’s best AI scribes act as medical copilots — capable of not only documenting visits but also streamline pre-visit chart preparation, surfacing patient history, automating forms, suggesting billing codes, and syncing seamlessly with EMRs.

Clinicians across North America are turning to these solutions to combat charting fatigue, improve accuracy, and spend more time with patients instead of screens.

How to select the right tool for your specialty, practice, workflow and team?

This guide compares the top AI scribes of 2025. Whether you’re a solo clinician, a growing group practice, or part of a large health system, you’ll have everything you need to find the right tool for you.

From AI Scribes to Clinical Copilots — How the Technology Has Evolved

Over the past few years, AI scribes have transformed from background ambient listeners to intelligent workflow assistants.

For small to medium-sized clinics and hospitals, the ideal AI scribe should combine enterprise-grade security with clinical-level usability — affordable, customizable, and available on every platform clinicians use.

How to Choose the Right AI Scribe in 2025

Based on physician research and recent peer-reviewed recommendations from Canadian Family Physician (Sept 2025), these are the five pillars that matter most when evaluating today’s AI medical scribes.

1. Accuracy & Note Quality: Understands medical context, specialty nuance, and negative findings; Learns from user edits to improve over time and minimizes editing.

2. Workflow Integration & Usability: Works across pre-visit intake, real-time scribing, and post-visit summaries. Integrates smoothly with EMRs; Covers in-person, telemedicine, voice dictation captures, and runs on web, mobile, and tablet.

3. Privacy & Compliance: Complies with PHIPA, PIPEDA, and HIPAA standards. Data is regionally hosted, fully encrypted, and auditable.

4. Pricing & Services Reliability: Transparent pricing with measurable time savings. Factor in uptime, support quality, and available funding and partnership discounts (e.g., AAFP, Infoway, OntarioMD, BC Health Authorities).

5. Physician & Patient Experience: Easy to use with fewer clicks and faster team adoption. Optimized for efficiency, with customizable templates and patient-friendly summaries.

Compare Leading AI Scribes — 2025 Overview

💡 Why Empathia AI

• Enterprise-level security at a clinic-friendly price

• End-to-end coverage: intake → charting → billing → handouts

• Available on web, iOS/Android app, Chrome extension, and tablets

• Customizable templates for every specialty

• Trusted by clinicians across Canada and the US

How Empathia Adapts to Every Workflow

Whether you’re managing quick urgent visits, multi-issue chronic care, multi-speaker family conversations, or complex surgical assessments, Empathia adapts to your real clinical workflow — not the other way around.

Family Medicine & Primary Care

Built for high-volume practices with multi-problem visits, chronic disease follow-ups, sick notes, and structured preventive care. Automated chart prep delivers clear summaries before every visit.

Pediatrics

Perfect for parent + child encounters, capturing multiple voices accurately. Supports developmental milestones, well-child visits, growth tracking, asthma/ADHD follow-ups, and school or daycare notes.

OB/GYN & Women’s Health

Streamlines prenatal and postpartum visits, gynecologic ROS, procedure notes, and referral workflows for fertility, pelvic health, and menopause care.

Psychiatry & Mental Health

Excels with long, narrative encounters — generating organized HPIs, MSEs, psychotherapy notes, trauma-informed interviews, and risk assessments.

Internal Medicine & Subspecialties

Built for complex, longitudinal care across multi-system disease. Customizable templates for:

• Oncology: treatment summaries, symptom trends, toxicity monitoring

• Allergy & Immunology: trigger histories, testing results, immunotherapy follow-ups

• Cardiology, Endocrinology, Respirology, Gastroenterology: detailed system-based assessments and monitoring

Surgical Specialties

Optimized for consult-heavy and peri-operative documentation, including:

• General Surgery: pre-op assessments, operative summaries, post-op follow-ups

• Orthopedics: injury/Msk exams, fracture management, post-op rehab documentation

• ENT: adult and pediatric consults, multi-speaker histories, procedure notes

• Plastics: aesthetic and reconstructive consults, pre/post-op wound evaluations

Telemedicine & Hybrid Care

Call patients directly through the app, record external telemed visits, and generate follow-up instructions instantly — all without switching tools.

Empathia is the one clinical copilot that adapts to every specialty, every visit type, and every documentation style — while keeping your workflow effortless.

The best AI scribes today do more than take notes: they act as clinical copilots, supporting the full care workflow before, during, and after each visit.

Clinicians and health system leaders now look for solutions that are accurate, secure, usability, and seamlessly woven into existing workflows.

Why Clinicians Choose Empathia Over Other AI Scribes

Across thousands of clinicians in Canada and the US, several themes consistently emerge when they compare Empathia with Freed, Tali, Nabla, Abridge, Suki, Scriberry, or Heidi.

Here are the most common differentiators that matter in real daily workflows:

1. Best-in-Class Mobile App Experience

• Designed for both community clinics and inpatient rounding, hospital rooming, and bedside care.

• Clinicians repeatedly describe Empathia’s mobile app as “more stable,” “faster,” and “smoother” than competitor apps.

• Ideal for physicians who move between rooms, sites, or hospitals.

2. All-in-One Telemedicine (The First in the Market)

• Call patients directly from the Empathia app with your clinic caller ID.

• Record any telemedicine visit, even if you’re using Zoom, Doxy, OTN, or another virtual platform.

• Seamlessly switches between in-person and remote workflows.

3. Chart Prep + AI Patient Intake

• Automatically generates patient chart summaries before the visit — saves time reviewing old notes.

• AI intake supports both digital forms and voice-based intake for patients who can’t complete forms online.

• Unlike other vendors only support patient context during visit and text only, Empathia supports uploading additional files pre-visit or post-visit for complete documentation.

4. Affordable MOA Collaboration

(Extremely popular with specialists)

• MOAs can help with sending intake forms, prepping charts, and autofilling forms.

• No need to buy another full physician seat.

• Includes a free trial and follows the same security and compliance standards.

5. Strong Multi-Lingual Support

Empathia delivers higher accuracy for the most common languages used across North America:

Chinese (Mandarin/Cantonese), Punjabi, Hindi, Farsi, Vietnamese, Spanish, French, and more.

• Reduces manual retranscription

• Improves accuracy for diverse patient populations

• Makes a big difference in hospital and community clinic settings

6. Easy Template Transfer & Customization

• Bring your existing templates from EMR, Word docs, or other AI scribe tools — we help you migrate them quickly.

• Highly customizable note structures for specialties, personal styles, and clinical requirements.

7. Responsive, Clinician-Centric Support

Clinicians frequently highlight how Empathia’s support is:

• Fast

• Local (Canada/US)

• Knowledgeable about clinical workflows

• Hands-on with onboarding and template building

8. Enterprise-Grade Security at a Clinic-Friendly Price

• Fully PHIPA, PIPEDA, and HIPAA compliant

• Regional data hosting

• Audit logs, MFA, encrypted data, and privacy-first architecture

• Deepest association discounts and Infoway-funded access available

💡 Empathia combines the security and reliability expected from enterprise vendors with pricing and usability optimized for everyday clinics.

Related resources:

• Comparing AI Scribes: How Empathia Delivers Value and Reliability

• How to Choose the Right AI Charting Tool: What Every Clinician Should Know

• Empathia AI Clinical Assistant Built for How You Practice - Product Details

• Check Empathia AI Clinical Workflow Hub: AI Medical Scribes in North America – Complete Guide for Physicians

• Check Empathia AI Specialty Hub: AI Medical Scribes by Specialty: PCP, Psychiatry, Surgery, Emergency Medicine & More

• Check Empathia AI Privacy Compliance Hub: AI & Compliance in Healthcare — Building Trust for Clinicians and Team