From site visit to signed quote in one workflow

TL;DR

• Record on-site from the Baubiber mobile app — works in the background while the phone is locked.
• Gemini transcribes and structures the recording into a site report: summary, key decisions, action items, per-room observations, proposed work.
• Two-step pipeline: the transcript is saved before the structuring step, so AI failures don't lose the recording's text — and retries are cheap.
• Contractor reviews, tapping any work item to set its price inline.
• Buyer signs in with a magic link, reads the report, comments per section, and acknowledges. No Baubiber account needed up front — Baubiber creates one on first tap.
• One-tap "Generate offer" turns the priced proposed work into an accepted offer the diary, work clock, and invoice flow take it from there.
• Manual project creation is now consistent across the mobile app, the Pro web dashboard, and the property-manager Nest dashboard.

What is a site-visit meeting in Baubiber?

A site-visit meeting is a structured record of a contractor walking through a property — recorded in the mobile app, transcribed and split per room by Gemini, then reviewed and acknowledged by the buyer. It replaces the "scribbled notes on the way back" step every renovation quote has lived with for decades.

The contractor schedules the meeting from the construction's Meetings tab, optionally jots a few pre-visit notes, and then taps Start recording when the visit begins. The recording continues while the phone is locked or the contractor switches apps — on iOS via background-audio mode, on Android via a foreground-service notification that doubles as a transparency cue for everyone on site.

When the contractor taps Stop & upload, the audio is sent to Baubiber, transcribed by Google Gemini, and then passed through a second AI step that produces a structured site report:

• One-paragraph executive summary of the visit.
• Concrete decisions made on-site.
• Action items for either side.
• Per-room observations with the contractor's proposed work — each item mapped to a canonical room type (kitchen, bathroom, hallway, …) and category (installation, repair, finishing, …).

How does the recording-to-quote flow actually work?

The end-to-end loop has six steps. Each runs in the same Baubiber app:

1. Schedule a site visit on a project — manual or one that came through the matching feed.
2. Record on-site. Speech-grade audio (~64 kbps mono AAC) so 30 minutes is about 15 MB and uploads fast even from a basement.
3. Transcribe + extract. Baubiber hits Gemini twice: once to transcribe verbatim, once to produce the structured report. The transcript is saved separately and immediately, so a structuring failure never costs the contractor a re-transcription.
4. Review. The contractor opens the report on their phone, taps any proposed-work row to set its price, and edits titles in place if the AI mis-titled anything. Deletion is a single tap.
5. Send to buyer. The contractor sends a magic-link email. The buyer taps once on their phone and lands directly on the report — read-only, with a comment thread per section and an Acknowledge button. Buyer's email is verified and a Baubiber account is created on first tap.
6. Generate offer. One tap copies the priced proposed-work items into a freshly accepted itemized offer. From here the existing diary, work clock, and invoice machinery takes over.

The buyer's view never shows individual prices until the formal offer goes out — protecting the contractor's pricing logic during review.

Why does the buyer need to acknowledge the report?

Two reasons. First, a written acknowledgement turns a casual conversation into something the contractor can point at when scope drifts during execution. Second, it triggers Baubiber's in-app notification to the contractor and opens the comment thread for any clarifications before pricing is finalised.

Comments can be anchored to a specific room observation or proposed-work item — when the buyer wants to push back on "replace the tiles" they leave it on the bathroom row, not a generic project-wide thread. The contractor sees the same anchors on their side.

Does the buyer have to install an app?

No. The magic-link email opens the Baubiber app on a phone that has it installed, and signs the buyer in via email otherwise. The buyer doesn't need a Baubiber account up front — Baubiber creates one for them, marked as a Baukuki (resident) user, the moment the link is verified.

For contractors who'd rather their buyer never log in at all, there's also a public read-only project status page at baubiber.com/status/… — a teaser view (no amounts) that nudges the buyer to sign up for the full picture. That's the same surface buyers see for self-managed projects without a site-visit meeting.

How long can a recording be?

Baubiber records at speech quality (~22 kHz mono AAC, ~64 kbps), so a 30-minute walk-through is roughly 15 MB. Recording continues when the phone is locked or the app is backgrounded — explicitly tested. There's no hard-coded duration cap, but we recommend single sessions stay under an hour so the AI extraction stays sharp on dense per-room detail.

What happens if the AI extraction fails?

We split the pipeline in two for exactly this reason. Step one transcribes the audio and persists the verbatim transcript. Step two takes that transcript and produces the structured per-room report.

If step two fails — Gemini timeout, malformed schema response, anything else — the FAILED panel surfaces the error with a Retry button, and the full transcript is already visible below. Retrying reuses the saved transcript instead of paying for transcription twice. The contractor never loses what was actually said.

How does the offer get generated from the meeting?

Every proposed-work item Gemini extracts is stored in the same data shape as an offer line item — title, description, category, location, optional amount. After the contractor prices each row inline, the Generate offer from this meeting button copies the priced list into a brand-new accepted itemized offer, ordered exactly as the AI arranged them.

Unpriced items are skipped (and the success message tells the contractor how many) so the offer stays clean. If the project already has an accepted offer — e.g. a rough one entered at project creation — Baubiber refuses to create a second; the contractor cancels the old one first.

Can a contractor or property manager open a project on behalf of a buyer?

Yes — and parity across surfaces was a primary goal of this release.

• Mobile app (Baubiber Pro): Build tab → New self-managed project. Buyer name / email / phone optional.
• Pro web dashboard: Constructions → New self-managed project dialog, now with the buyer's email + phone so the magic-link invite fires from the web too.
• Nest (property-manager) dashboard: a new Projects → New project route with a property picker filtered to OWNER/MANAGER properties. Property managers can open projects on buildings they manage, prefill the resident's contact, and the magic-link invite goes out automatically.

The authorisation logic ("is the caller allowed to open a project on this property?") is extracted into a pure helper with seven unit tests covering every combination — defense in depth so a property manager can't accidentally become the accepted-offer contractor.

Where does this fit in Baubiber's bigger picture?

Baubiber is an AI renovation platform connecting residents (Baukukis — tenants, owners, property managers) with construction professionals (Baubibers) and the property managers overseeing buildings. The site-visit recorder closes a long- standing gap: most renovation quotes still start with a walk-through, but the data captured there is locked inside the contractor's notebook until they sit down to write a proposal.

With this release, that data is live the moment the contractor steps out of the property. The diary, work clock, and invoice flow all key off the same structured site report — so a Baubiber contractor's quote, time tracking, and final invoices share one source of truth from the very first visit.

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Available in the Baubiber Pro mobile app and the Pro and Nest dashboards. The audio recording feature requires a native build (iOS or Android).