It is a tool that lets a tradie speak a job description into their phone for one to two minutes — the property, the work, the materials, the access — and get back a clean, itemised draft quote to review and send. It transcribes what you said, applies your own rates and standard line items, and lays out labour, materials and totals in your format. It drafts; you review, adjust and send. It does not set your prices, send quotes on its own, or replace your judgment. Built by Kanaky Tech for electricians, plumbers, builders and painters across Auckland and New Zealand.
The real problem: quoting after hours
Ask any sparky, plumber or builder where their evenings go and the answer is the same: quoting. You finish on site at five or six, drive home, eat, and then sit down with a laptop to write up the jobs you looked at that day. An hour here, two hours there. By the time the quote is formatted and sent, it is often the next morning — and the customer has already had two other tradies reply.
This is not a small problem. In the trades, the fastest quote very often wins the job. A homeowner with a leaking pipe or a dead circuit is not running a tender; they are calling three people and going with whoever answers properly first. Every hour a quote sits unwritten is an hour a competitor can get in ahead of you. The admin tax of quoting is real, and it lands squarely on your own time at night, unpaid.
How voice-to-quote actually works
The idea is simple: do the part you are good at — describing the job out loud — and let software do the part you hate, the typing and formatting. Here is the flow, start to finish:
- You speak. Right after you walk a site, or sitting in the van, you open the tool and talk for a minute or two: "Single-storey villa in Mount Eden, replace the switchboard, run two new circuits to the kitchen, half a day labour, materials roughly this, access is fine."
- It transcribes and structures. The tool turns your words into text, identifies the work, the materials and the labour you mentioned, and matches them against your standard line items.
- It drafts the quote. Using your rates — your hourly labour, your markups, your usual items — it builds an itemised draft: scope, line items, quantities, totals, in your format.
- You review and send. You open the draft on your phone, check the numbers, fix anything that needs fixing, add a note, and send it. Nothing goes out until you say so.
The whole loop takes minutes. The job you would have written up at 9pm gets quoted from the van at 3pm, while it is fresh in your head — and the customer gets a reply the same afternoon.
What it does — and what it deliberately doesn't
It is worth being honest here, because there is a lot of hype around AI and the trades deserve straight talk. A voice-to-quote tool is a drafting assistant. It is not magic, and it is not a robot estimator.
- It does remove the typing, the formatting and the late-night data entry.
- It does use your own rates and line items, so the draft reads like your quotes, not a generic template.
- It does let you reply to enquiries faster, which is the single biggest lever on jobs won.
- It does not set your prices or guess market rates — it works from the numbers you give it.
- It does not send anything on its own. Every quote passes through your eyes first.
- It does not replace your judgment — how long a tricky job really takes, what a hard site needs, when to walk away. That stays yours.
That last point matters most. The value is not that the machine "knows" your trade; it does not. The value is that it gives you back the half-hour of admin per quote so you can spend your evening with your family instead of a spreadsheet.
Who it fits
It suits any trade that quotes a lot of small-to-medium jobs and loses time writing them up: electricians, plumbers, builders, painters, roofers, landscapers. The more enquiries you get and the more quotes you turn around, the more time it gives back. A one-person operation feels it immediately — you are the admin department — but small crews quoting twenty jobs a week feel it too.
It is part of a broader pattern we see across Auckland and New Caledonia: small businesses drowning in repetitive admin that does not need a human to do it. Voice-to-quote is one slice of business process automation — the same thinking applied to invoicing, scheduling, follow-ups and enquiry handling. Quoting is just usually the most painful place to start.
Faster quotes, more jobs won
Strip away everything else and this is the point. When a quote takes two minutes to draft instead of an hour to write, two things change. First, you reply faster, so you are the tradie who got back to the customer while they were still deciding. Second, you quote more jobs, because the friction of writing them up no longer makes you put it off. Faster replies plus more quotes out the door is a direct line to more work won — without working later or charging less.
See if voice-to-quote fits your trade
Start with a free AI opportunity audit. We look at how you quote today and tell you honestly whether this would save you real time — no charge, no obligation.
Book a free AI auditHow to start without overcommitting
You do not need to rebuild how you run your business. The sensible first step is a conversation. We run a free AI audit where we look at how you quote now, how many enquiries you reckon you lose to slow replies, and whether voice-to-quote is even worth it for your trade. If it is, we scope a build sized to your business and your rate card. If it is not — if you only quote two jobs a week, or your quotes are too bespoke to template — we will tell you straight.
Kanaky Tech is a small Pacific studio that builds practical AI and automation for real businesses, from Nouméa to Auckland. We are not interested in selling you software you will not use. If you are not sure where to begin or who handles this kind of thing, here is a plain guide on who to contact for AI automation — and you are welcome to just send us a couple of your recent quotes and ask.
You speak a plain description of the job into your phone for one to two minutes: the property, the work, the materials, any access or labour notes. The tool transcribes what you said, pulls in your own rates and standard line items, and returns a structured draft quote with itemised labour, materials and totals. You then open it, check it, adjust anything, and send it. It removes the typing and formatting, not the thinking.
No. It drafts; you decide. The tool never sends a quote on its own and never sets your prices for you. It uses your rates, your line items and your wording, and it hands the result back for you to review before anything goes out. Your trade judgment — how long a job really takes, what a tricky site needs, what to charge — stays entirely yours. Think of it as a fast typist who already knows your price list, not a replacement for the person on the tools.
The draft is as accurate as the rates and standard items you give it, because it builds the quote from your own numbers rather than guessing market prices. The wording and structure are reliable; the figures reflect whatever rate card you load in. Because you always review before sending, the tradie remains the final check on every quote — so an unusual job is caught by you, not waved through by a machine.
The first step is a free AI opportunity audit: we look at how you quote today, how many enquiries you lose to slow replies, and whether voice-to-quote is even worth it for your trade. Only after that do we scope and price a build, sized to your business. There is no charge to find out if it fits, and no obligation to proceed.
Book a free AI audit with Kanaky Tech. We talk through your quoting process, you show us a couple of recent quotes, and we tell you honestly whether a voice-to-quote setup would save you real time. If it would, we scope a build around your rates and the way you already work. If it would not, we will say so.