Best AI Clinical Notes for Open Dental (2026)
I practice general dentistry, I run Open Dental, and I build one of the products on this list. This page ranks AI clinical-note and scribe tools on three columns that actually decide whether the thing works in an Open Dental office: does the finished note land in the patient’s chart, where does the vendor sit on Open Dental’s own trust-tier list, and does the vendor keep your audio.
Disclosure, before anything else. Intake.Dental is my company, and it is ranked third below. I have tried to hold it to a harder standard than the vendors I do not own, starting with the column where it comes off worst: Intake.Dental does not appear on any Open Dental vendor list, in any tier. Not Authorized, not In Transition, not Native — simply absent. Every other product on this page has a published tier. If my reasoning about my own product reads as self-serving, the honest remedy is to weight entry three at zero and read the other six; nothing else here depends on you believing me about me.
Everything else — summary quality, template libraries, “trained on millions of notes” — is downstream of those three columns. A beautiful note that lives in a vendor’s web tab is not a clinical record. A vendor that Open Dental has flagged as Dangerous/Unknown is telling you something about how it gets its data. And a vendor that retains voice recordings has created a discoverable archive of every conversation in your operatory, which is a decision you should make deliberately rather than by default.
Two pieces of context before the list.
First, the trust tiers. Open Dental publishes a public vendor list: 87 Authorized, 11 Authorized In Transition, 22 Dangerous/Unknown, 11 Not Currently Active, and 14 Native Integrations. Dangerous/Unknown generally means direct database access or unwhitelisted plugins. Getting listed is free — you email [email protected] — so the tier is a safety signal, not paid placement. I have not found a better independent filter in this category. Note the asymmetry that catches buyers out: a bad tier is a finding, but no tier is not a clean bill of health, it is an absence of information.
Second, accuracy. The most useful peer-reviewed data on AI scribes comes from a study published in JMIR Medical Informatics: 7,545 notes generated, 356 formally evaluated. Accidental omissions 18 percent, hallucinations 11.5 percent, accidental inclusions 9.3 percent — so omissions ran roughly 1.6 times as often as hallucinations. Omissions are both the most common failure and the one nobody markets against, because a note missing a finding still reads fluently. Those are the only accuracy figures I will quote on this page. Every accuracy, scale or retention claim attributed to a vendor below is that vendor’s own published statement, mine included, and none of it is independently audited. When you pilot any of these, review for what is missing, not for what sounds wrong.
1. Claio
Claio is Authorized, and it is one of only two products here that answer both of my decisive questions explicitly in published writing rather than in a sales call. The other is mine, which is why I am not claiming the distinction for Claio alone. Claio states on its own site that notes go straight into the PMS, filed to the patient’s chart rather than a separate tab, and that audio is processed in real time and never stored.
That is a short paragraph but it is doing enormous work. Most vendors will not put either sentence in writing at all. Claio’s capture is ambient, so you are not dictating at a device — the conversation is the input.
What it does not do is perio. If your reason for buying a voice tool is probing depths, Claio is not the answer and you should skip to Bola or Avora. For general operative and hygiene documentation on Open Dental, it is the vendor I would shortlist first, and I say that as a competitor.
2. Bola AI
Bola is the only clinical-documentation vendor with a Native Integration — a first-party Open Dental bridge, not merely an Authorized API listing. That is a real structural advantage and it shows up in the one place it matters most: voice perio charting. Measurements save into Open Dental. Nobody else in this list does perio as convincingly.
That combination — the only first-party integration on the page, plus the only credible voice perio — is why Bola ranks above my own product, which has neither.
Two things to know before you sign. Enabling the bridge disables Open Dental’s built-in perio microphone, so this is a replacement for your existing workflow rather than a layer on top of it. And Bola publishes no audio retention position that I can find, and no pricing either — expect a quote rather than a page. Ask both questions in writing. More detail in our Bola AI review.
3. Intake.Dental
This is my company. The disclosure at the top of this page applies to every sentence in this section.
Why third and not higher, in the page’s own three terms. On chart filing it does well: the flow is dictation to structured note, provider approves, and the approved note files into the patient’s chart through the Open Dental API, dated to the visit. On audio it does well: dictation audio is never written to disk, S3, or a database — it exists in memory only, and transcript text is erased after 24 hours of inactivity, a rolling window that resets if you reopen a draft, so an interrupted recording survives and a finished dictation can be continued. Separate opt-in, consent-gated recording features do store audio, so I will not make a blanket claim that nothing is ever stored. On the trust-tier column it fails outright: it is not on Open Dental’s vendor list at all. Bola AI beats it on two of three columns and on perio, so Bola ranks higher. It sits above Denti.AI only on the audio column; if you weight installed base and track record above retention posture — a completely defensible choice — put Denti.AI ahead of it.
Some further mechanics: signed notes are never rewritten, and corrections file as dated addenda. PHI is encrypted at the field level at rest and we sign a BAA. The Open Dental specifics are documented on the Open Dental clinical notes page.
The honest limitations. An Open Dental commlog has no provider field, so the provider’s name is written into the body of the note itself — that is weaker than Dentrix Ascend, where the note files against a real provider field, and I will not pretend otherwise. There is no structured provider attribution on Open Dental, from us or from anyone. On Open Dental we also do not do appointment status updates, cancellations, or perio charts. Claims submission runs outside the PMS.
And the bigger ones: the company was founded in 2025, the installed base is small, there is no multi-year public review history, and there are no published third-party reviews to point you at. Any established vendor on this page has more clinical volume behind it than I do. If your buying criterion is “who has the most Open Dental chairs,” I am not the answer, and if your criterion is “who has an Open Dental trust tier,” I am not the answer either.
Where it does win is scope: the same integration also covers intake forms including insurance card images, eligibility verification with writeback, payment posting, treatment plans, AR, patient search and create, appointment read and create, and self-scheduling. If you were going to buy a scribe and three other things, one API connection is worth something. But that is a fourth criterion, not one of the three this page is judged on, and if you only want a scribe it is worth nothing to you — in which case Claio is the cleaner buy.
4. Denti.AI
Denti.AI is the most heavily marketed dedicated dental ambient scribe in this category, and it markets that notes save directly to Dentrix, Eaglesoft and Open Dental with one click. It publishes clinician-count and DSO-reference claims; those are vendor figures and I have not verified them, so I am not repeating the numbers here. If you want the safety of the crowd, ask them for referenceable Open Dental practices of your size and call two.
Two caveats keep it out of my top three. It sits in Authorized In Transition, not Authorized, on Open Dental’s list. And its own privacy policy states that voice data is collected and retained as long as necessary, with no discard guarantee. That may be perfectly acceptable to you; it is a different posture from Claio’s, and you should choose it on purpose. Our Denti.AI review goes deeper on the retention language.
5. Kaila Voice
Kaila Voice is Authorized and built exclusively for Open Dental. It integrates through the Open Dental API and syncs with Open Dental’s native Auto Note feature, which is a genuinely thoughtful fit — you keep the note structure your practice already uses rather than importing a vendor’s templates.
On retention, the company states the transcription server does not persist, but that active records are kept for a minimum of 90 days. That is a floor without a ceiling, and it is worth a direct question in writing. The single-PMS focus cuts both ways: excellent alignment today, no path with you if you ever migrate.
6. Avora
Avora is Authorized and does both notes and perio charting, writing back to Dentrix, Open Dental, Eaglesoft, Denticon and Ascend — the broadest PMS coverage here. Its signature feature is that every note line links back to the moment in the recording, which is a legitimately good verification tool for reviewing what the AI heard.
It also means the audio is stored. That is not a flaw, it is the architecture, and it is the honest tradeoff for an audit trail. If your risk posture makes a retained recording of every operatory conversation unacceptable, Avora is disqualified on that basis alone regardless of note quality.
7. ScribeHealth.ai (HealOS)
ScribeHealth markets a zero-storage voice policy, which sounds like exactly what this page has been asking for. Two facts argue against it for a dental practice. Open Dental places it in the Dangerous/Unknown tier on its own published list. And its published integration list contains no dental PMS at all — Epic, Cerner, Athena — while it offers a Chrome extension, which reads as screen-scraping rather than API access. I am reporting Open Dental’s classification, not adding my own; go read the list yourself before you decide.
How I would actually buy this
Shortlist two. Run them on the same ten appointments, same operatory, same week. Then read every note against the chart for what is missing, because 18 percent is the omission rate in the literature and it will not announce itself. Ask each vendor, in email, two sentences: where does the finished note land, and is the audio retained. A vendor that will not answer those in writing has answered them.
Adjacent tools worth knowing: Codenta.AI is Authorized but is a note and code auditor rather than a scribe, DentalBee now redirects to Overjet Voice, and Savvy Agents and Solara Dental AI bundle a scribe into a broader front-office product. And before you add anything, check what you already pay for — Open Dental sells its own eServices bundle covering Web Forms, Patient Portal, eReminders, eConfirmations, Integrated Texting and Web Sched. I am not quoting a price for it here because I do not have a current published figure I can stand behind; get it from Open Dental directly. Several “AI add-ons” overlap with what that bundle already does.