Short answer for Illinois: Get the patient's consent before recording, and document it — verbal consent satisfies Illinois's recording law. There is a second, unsettled question under Illinois's biometric law (BIPA) about whether the speaker-separation step in any AI transcript counts as a "voiceprint." Chartnote's scribe separates speakers into anonymous labels but does not build a lasting voice profile or identify people by name. Because the law here is actively being litigated, Illinois clinics that want maximum certainty may choose to use written consent.
Not legal advice. This area of Illinois law is unsettled and the penalties are significant. Confirm your approach with your own counsel or compliance team.
Illinois's eavesdropping law (720 ILCS 5/14-2) requires the consent of all parties to record or transcribe a private conversation. A clinical visit qualifies. Verbal consent satisfies this — just add a short note in the chart that you obtained it. Always include anyone else in the room (family, caregiver, interpreter) in the ask.
The Biometric Information Privacy Act (740 ILCS 14) regulates biometric identifiers, and its definition includes voiceprints. Where BIPA applies it is demanding: it requires written, informed consent before a biometric identifier is collected, a published retention-and-destruction policy, and it carries a private right of action with statutory damages of $1,000 (negligent) and $5,000 (intentional or reckless) per violation, with each capture potentially counting separately. A wave of 2025–2026 lawsuits has targeted AI transcription tools on the theory that separating speakers by voice creates a voiceprint.
How Chartnote's scribe actually works. Chartnote transcribes with Deepgram. Deepgram's diarization detects speaker changes and labels each utterance with an anonymous tag (for example, "Speaker 0" and "Speaker 1"). Technically it does this by clustering audio segments by their acoustic characteristics within that single recording — it computes speaker embeddings as an intermediate step, then groups utterances. Critically, it produces anonymous, within-recording labels: it does not enroll a known voice, does not attach a name to a speaker, and does not maintain a persistent voice profile that re-identifies the same person across different recordings.
Why it's still an open question. Whether that kind of anonymous, ephemeral speaker separation is a "voiceprint" under BIPA has not been settled by the courts. Plaintiffs argue that measuring vocal characteristics to tell speakers apart is itself biometric collection, regardless of whether a name is attached. The counter-argument is that an anonymous label that isn't retained or used to identify a specific individual is not a biometric identifier in BIPA's sense. The current lawsuits are early-stage and unresolved, so neither side has been confirmed by a court.
See the main article, Do I Need Patient Consent to Use an AI Scribe? If you choose to collect written consent in Illinois, use the Sample Consent Form for AI Scribe.
Last reviewed: June 2026.