The rules that apply everywhere
These four things are true of every AI feature in Pigeonhole, so you don’t have to check each one:- AI output is always a draft or a suggestion. It fills in the box you’re working in, and you edit it before you do anything with it. Nothing is saved or published automatically.
- Writing rules checks are advisory. They show a reminder and a Proceed anyway button. They never stop anyone publishing.
- Photos and videos are never sent to the AI. Drafting works from text only.
- Approval is unchanged. Every workflow that needed a person to approve it still needs a person to approve it.
Writing observations and reports
Observation AI assist
Turn rough notes or a voice note into a first draft, with suggested learning links you accept or dismiss one at a time.
Voice dictation
Speak your notes into your phone and have them transcribed, ready to turn into a draft.
Observation writing rules
Plain-language rules the AI checks staff writing against before an observation is submitted or published.
Test your rules
Paste in sample text and see exactly what staff would be shown, before you commit to the wording.
Draft a report from observations
Build a first draft of a progress report from a child’s published observations, shaped by your learning frameworks.
Report writing rules
A separate set of rules for reports, because reports are written for a different audience.
Getting answers and finding things
AI Assistant
Ask questions about children, attendance, finance and funding, export what you find, or get early years advice.
Document search and summaries
Find a document by what’s inside it, not just its file name, and read a summary of a long one.
Custom Agents
Describe a report in plain English, save it, and have it emailed to you on a schedule.
Getting data in
CSV column mapping
Upload a CSV in any format and the AI works out which column is which. No template needed.
Chrome extension capture
Pull children and parents straight off your old system’s pages, and fill council forms from your Pigeonhole data.
Term date lookup
Populate searches for your council’s published term dates. Always check them before you save.
Form submissions to child records
Turn a completed registration form into fields on the child’s record without retyping.
Safeguarding
DSL summary generator
The wand icon next to the DSL Summary field drafts a summary from the concern, its history and its actions.
Turning AI features off
You control which AI features your setting uses:- Observation AI drafting — the AI drafting switch on Settings → Observations. Turning it off hides the Assist panel and dictation from staff.
- Report AI drafting — the AI drafting switch on Settings → Reports.
- Observations and Reports as a whole — the Features card on your Site Profile. Switching a feature off hides it from staff and families. Nothing is deleted.
- Writing rules — leave the rules box empty and no check runs.
Turning AI drafting off does not turn the writing rules check off. A setting that would rather staff wrote observations themselves usually still wants its house rules checked, so the two are controlled separately.
How your data is handled
- Pigeonhole sends the AI only the text needed for the task you asked for — the notes you typed, the observation text a report is summarising, or the concern details a safeguarding summary covers.
- Photos and videos are never sent to the AI. For documents, only the text extracted for search and summaries is used.
- Your data is not used to train models and is never shared with another setting.
- The AI Assistant only reads your own nursery’s data, and only when you ask it a question that needs it.
- Journal digest emails to parents are not written by AI. They are a fixed template that lists the new moments published since the last one.
- For child protection topics the Assistant will point you to the appropriate authorities rather than advise you itself.