A general dental office near Los Angeles used an AI receptionist on Open Dental for overflow and after-hours calls from June 2025. A part-time staff member read the summaries of all 1,432 calls over 15 months and every failed call transcript. The AI never put a caller through to a person, struggled to spell names (especially Spanish names) and sometimes said it would make a change and then didn't. The author later built a competing product, so weigh the comparisons with that in mind.
Business type: Clinics & dental. Tool used: Dental AI receptionist (not named) + Open Dental. Result: Of 637 calls where someone wanted something done, the write-up reports the AI completed 263 (41%), including 70 bookings, 43 reschedules and 29 cancellations. 28 of the 70 bookings were new patients. Callers asked for a person 65 times. Cost was about $300 a month, or about $400 counting staff callbacks (the author's estimate).
Source: How Dentists Use AI (write-up of an r/Dentists post) (Shared by the builder) · Added Wed, Oct 28 · Last updated 2026-10-28
Of 637 calls where someone wanted something done, the write-up reports the AI completed 263 (41%), including 70 bookings, 43 reschedules and 29 cancellations. 28 of the 70 bookings were new patients. Callers asked for a person 65 times. Cost was about $300 a month, or about $400 counting staff callbacks (the author's estimate). (as reported by the source)
Guide: AI receptionist for small business: real examples and how to set one up
Guide: AI receptionist for dental offices: real examples and how to set one up
A general dental office near Los Angeles used an AI receptionist on Open Dental for overflow and after-hours calls from June 2025. A part-time staff member read the summaries of all 1,432 calls over 15 months and every failed call transcript. The AI never put a caller through to a person, struggled to spell names (especially Spanish names) and sometimes said it would make a change and then didn't. The author later built a competing product, so weigh the comparisons with that in mind.
Dental AI receptionist (not named) + Open Dental.
Of 637 calls where someone wanted something done, the write-up reports the AI completed 263 (41%), including 70 bookings, 43 reschedules and 29 cancellations. 28 of the 70 bookings were new patients. Callers asked for a person 65 times. Cost was about $300 a month, or about $400 counting staff callbacks (the author's estimate). (as reported by the source)
Have the AI email a short summary after every call that says whether the task got done. Once a month, count calls by outcome: booked, rescheduled, message only, hung up. Read every call that didn't finish and group the reasons.
Answers come only from the source. Questions it doesn't answer are left out.
Our own prompt for copying this setup. Swap in your details. Not quoted from the source.
Here are last month's AI receptionist call summaries: [paste]. Sort every call into: booked, rescheduled, cancelled, message only, info only, hung up, or failed. For each failed call, give the reason in a few words. Then list the top 3 reasons and one fix for each.
A two-location dental group put an AI receptionist on calls it was missing (about 500 a month), booking patients straight into the schedule. The vendor reports $134k in booked production from September 2025 to April 2026, including $34k in the first full month.
A Grapevine, TX chiropractic and acupuncture clinic with 150+ calls a month put a 24/7 AI on the phones. In the first 30 days it handled 172 calls and booked 32 new appointments, plus many text threads, so staff could focus on patients in the chair.
A dentist running two offices with a single receptionist put an AI on both phone lines. In its first 90 days it handled 1,700+ calls and booked 184 appointments into the practice software, including 12 new patients, about $230K in production.