The calls your front desk actually gets
Most calls to a dental office are administrative. Someone wants a cleaning, needs to move Thursday's appointment, asks whether you accept their insurance, or wants to know where to park. A smaller number come from patients in pain, often in the evening or at the weekend, asking what they should do.
What the assistant does on those calls
- Takes appointment and rescheduling requests. It collects the patient's name, best phone number and the reason for the visit, reads the details back and says the team will confirm. If you connect Calendly, Google Calendar or Microsoft Outlook, it can offer real open times and book them. Without a calendar connected, every booking is a request your team confirms.
- Answers front-desk questions about your hours, address, services and the insurance plans you list in your business details. If something isn't in your details or knowledge base, it says so and offers to take a message instead of guessing.
- Follows your dental emergency policy. When a caller describes severe pain, swelling, bleeding or trauma, it offers the next step you've written down, such as a same-day emergency slot or a message for the on-call dentist. Messages marked urgent are emailed to your team.
- Transfers callers to up to five people on your list, such as the office manager, once a phone number is connected.
What it won't do
The dental assistant is built to stay out of clinical territory:
- It never diagnoses, recommends medication or dosages, or says whether symptoms are serious. Asked "should I take ibuprofen or antibiotics?", it offers an appointment or your emergency policy instead. That exact question is one of the automated tests the brain has to pass before it's offered to practices.
- It doesn't ask for or record medical history over the phone beyond the reason for the visit.
- It never takes card numbers for deposits or balances.
- It tells callers it's an AI assistant if they ask.
- If someone describes a life-threatening emergency, it tells them to hang up and call 911.
Setting it up
- Choose the dental office assistant in the Brain Marketplace.
- Fill in your business details: hours, services, insurance accepted and your dental emergency policy, which is required.
- Add the questions patients ask most, such as new-patient paperwork, payment options or parking, to the Knowledge Base and approve them.
- Publish, run the automatic tests and try a few conversations in the chat playground.
- Get a RingMind phone number and connect it to the assistant. The getting started guide walks through each step.
Where the calls end up
Every call is saved with a transcript. Messages the assistant takes appear in your dashboard with the caller's details and urgency, and one click turns a message into a task for whoever handles callbacks. If you turn on SMS and WhatsApp, patients' texts arrive in the same inbox as their calls.
Tools it can connect
Connect a calendar so the assistant can offer real appointment times, or Microsoft Teams so your team gets notified about calls and urgent requests. All integrations are currently in Beta, so check the first few results after connecting. Plans and what they include are on the pricing page.