Dental Practices
The AI front desk for dental practices
The average dental office misses a meaningful share of its inbound calls during open hours. Ava answers all of them — and Max texts back the ones that still slip.
- $450+
- Typical first-visit value of a new patient
- 10 sec
- Missed-call text-back time
- 24/7
- Including lunch, evenings and weekends
In short
An AI receptionist for a dental office answers inbound calls and texts, books new-patient and hygiene appointments, answers insurance and pricing questions, and fills last-minute cancellations. optni.ai runs Ava on voice and Max on SMS sharing one memory. Dental practices see the clearest return on new-patient calls, which are typically worth several hundred dollars on the first visit and far more over the life of the patient — and which rarely call back after reaching voicemail.
What's actually broken
Why dental practices lose calls
Not a staffing failure. A structural one — and it is the same three things at almost every practice.
The phone rings loudest at lunch — when nobody is there
Patients call on their own break, which is your team's break. The lunch hour is one of the highest-volume call windows in a dental office and one of the least covered. Those calls do not get returned; they get placed to the next practice.
A cancelled crown at 9am is a hole in the day
Filling a same-day gap means someone working a call list while also running the front. Most days that does not happen, and a $1,200 appointment becomes an hour of paid idle chair time.
New-patient calls are handled by whoever is free
The highest-stakes call your practice receives gets answered by whoever happens to be closest to the phone, in the middle of another task. The quality of that thirty seconds decides whether the patient books.
What Ava and Max do here
Built around how a dental practice actually runs
Books new patients with a consistent script
Ava handles every new-patient call the same way your best front-desk person would on her best day: the question about insurance, the cost of a first visit, two real openings, booked.
Fills cancellations from your own list
When a slot opens, Max texts patients who wanted an earlier appointment and books the first one to reply. The chair gets filled without anyone making a call.
Handles insurance questions without a human
Ava answers from the carrier list you configure, quotes your cash prices, and routes anything genuinely complex to your team with the patient's details already captured.
Brings back patients overdue for hygiene
Max texts patients past due for a recall with a booking link. Hygiene recall is the highest-margin appointment in the practice and the easiest to let slide.
Works with
Not on the list? Bookings arrive as a text and email to your front desk with one-tap confirmation while we build the connector — nothing is lost in the meantime.
The fair objection
"We already have Weave / an answering service"
Those solve different halves of the problem. An answering service takes a message — a human writes down a name and your team calls back later, by which point the patient has booked elsewhere. A phone-system platform like Weave requires replacing your phone system to get the AI. optni.ai keeps your existing number and phone setup, and actually completes the booking on the call rather than handing you a callback task. If you already run Weave, we sit alongside it.
See it in your words
A dental practice conversation, start to finish
Scripted for this practice type. Tap through it as the patient.
Pick a scenario
What it's costing you
Includes rings-out during open hours, not just after close.
Recoverable per month
$63,000
≈ 140 visits a month your front desk never got the chance to book
Estimate only: 26 business days × 60% of missed calls recovered. Your own numbers will differ — this is a sizing tool, not a forecast.
Bright Smile Dental
Max · AI text front desk
A scripted demo — tap the chips to steer it. Want the real thing? Have Ava call you.
HIPAA-ready
Business Associate Agreement available on every plan
TCPA + A2P 10DLC
Registered messaging, express written consent captured
Encrypted end to end
TLS 1.3 in transit, AES-256 at rest
Audit logged
Six-year retention on every call and message
Questions
Dental Practices ask these first
Yes. Confirmed bookings write back to Open Dental, Dentrix, Eaglesoft, Curve Dental and Google Calendar. Where a connector is still being built, appointments arrive as a text and email to the front desk with one-tap confirmation.
Weave bundles AI into a phone system, so adopting it means replacing your phone service. Arini is dental-only and voice-only. optni.ai keeps your existing number and phone system, and runs voice and text as one agent with shared memory — so a call that drops mid-booking continues over SMS without the patient repeating themselves.
Ava answers from the carrier list and fee schedule you configure — which plans you accept, what a new-patient visit costs in cash, what a cleaning runs. She does not verify individual benefits; those calls route to your team with details captured.
Ava books by provider when your schedule is configured that way. If the requested person is unavailable, she offers their next opening alongside the soonest available alternative rather than guessing on the patient's behalf.
Most practices are live the same day. You forward your number, we load your hours, providers, services and pricing, and you test Ava yourself before any real patient reaches her.
Hear it answer a dental practice call
Thirty seconds on the phone with Ava will tell you more than this page did.