What is Benchling Voice?
Capture more data than ever with Benchling Voice. Speak your observations, measurements, and notes, and Benchling Voice turns them into structured content in your Benchling notebook, so you can keep your hands on your work instead of on a keyboard.
Voice picks up what you say and:
- Drops it into a notebook entry as text
- Recognizes values you call out (like measurements or IDs) and places them into the right fields
- Can take the same actions on your Benchling records that you'd normally take yourself — for example, updating fields, creating entries, or capturing results
Note: While in Preview, Benchling Voice does not consume any Benchling credits.
How to enable Benchling Voice
Benchling Voice is enabled at the tenant level by a Tenant admin. Full Actions mode must also be enabled, to ensure a hands-free experience.
- Go to the Tenant Admin Console
- Navigate to Settings > AI Settings
- Under Chat, make sure Full Actions mode is enabled for the relevant users
Under Chat Extensions, look for Realtime Voice and toggle it on for the relevant users
- Users should now see a waveform icon for Voice in the chat window.
How to access and use Benchling Voice
Accessing Benchling Voice
Once your account has Benchling Voice and Full Actions enabled, voice can be accessed from any AI Chat:
- Open a notebook entry > Click Edit contents in the top right corner > Click Voice (waveform icon) to start a session
- AI > New Chat > Click Voice (waveform icon) to start a session
- AI > Open an existing chat > Click Voice (waveform icon) to start a session
Using Benchling Voice
Benchling voice can take a variety of actions on your behalf in Benchling, though a common use case is for capturing experimental data in a notebook entry in realtime. To do this, you can
- Create your notebook entry
- Start a chat from Edit contents on the entry or from the AI side panel
- In the chat, click the waveform icon to start recording
- If needed, provide Benchling with microphone access
- Speak naturally — describe what you're doing, call out values, add notes, insert tables ad hoc
- See transcripts populate the chat for your messages and the agent's responses
- Click Stop when you're done
- Review what Benchling Voice captured
Supported Actions
- Search Benchling for objects
- Read attachments and documents
- Create and edit draft documents
- Including inserting structured and plain tables and editing their cell values
- Create and edit entries
- Including inserting structured and plain tables and editing their cell values
Key use cases
- Hands-free data capture at the bench: call out measurements, observations, and sample IDs while your hands are busy with pipettes, gloves, or equipment — no need to stop and type.
- Faster notebook entries:Talk through a procedure as you go instead of writing it up afterward from memory or scratch notes.
Capture context in the moment: Note something unusual or an aside the instant it happens, rather than trying to remember it later when you sit down to document.