Does an AI receptionist actually book into Open Dental, or just take a message?

It varies enormously, and the marketing does not distinguish. Echo documents the mechanism most clearly — Open Dental's REST API, scoped through the native Developer Key system that you can permission-limit or revoke — and describes reading the live schedule and writing appointments, reschedules, cancellations and new patients back in real time. KickCall AI states it books, reschedules and cancels in Open Dental via the official API. At the other end, SmileDial never confirms anywhere that it writes appointments into the PMS, and VoiceStack's own site only says the AI 'guides the patient to booking.' Make the vendor screen-share a live call and show the appointment landing in your Open Dental appointment module.

What is the Open Dental vendor list and why does it matter?

Open Dental publishes public trust tiers for third-party vendors: 87 Authorized, 11 Authorized In Transition, 22 Dangerous/Unknown, 11 Not Currently Active, plus 14 Native Integrations. Dangerous/Unknown means direct database access or unwhitelisted plugins rather than the API. Listing is free (vendor.relations@opendental.com), so a vendor's absence is not a budget issue. But Authorized confirms only the method, not the depth — Assort Health and IntelePeer are both Authorized and neither names Open Dental on its own website. Note that Henry Schein One holds its API Exchange vendors to a different bar, requiring SOC 2 Type II and OAuth 2.0.

Which of these publish real pricing?

Four. Echo: Starter $499/mo ($449 annually) for 50,000 tokens, Growth $1,999/mo ($1,799 annually) for 225,000 tokens, with a token at $0.01 and a call at 100 tokens — roughly $1.00 per call — though the one-time PMS integration setup fee is never published. RingDental: $149 / $299 / $599 per location with $0.45/min overage, though PMS integration is reportedly gated out of the $149 tier. Solara Dental AI: $149 and $349 per month billed annually. Intake.Dental: $499/mo for the receptionist, $799.99/mo for the Practice Autopilot bundle (disclosure: I build Intake.Dental and also practice dentistry). Savvy Agents, AiroDental and KickCall AI publish nothing — AiroDental and KickCall do not even have a live pricing page.

How does Intake.Dental compare on this specific page?

Disclosure: I build Intake.Dental and I am a practicing dentist, so treat this answer accordingly — I rank it last of seven here. Appointment create and read are supported on Open Dental and Dentrix Ascend, but appointment status updates and cancellation are NOT supported on Open Dental and stay manual, which is precisely what Echo and KickCall AI document doing. It is also not listed on any Open Dental vendor list in any tier, while the six vendors above it are Authorized. Its actual advantage is clinical depth — notes filed to the chart dated to the visit, hands-free voice perio writing a new perio exam with probes after provider review, eligibility written back to the chart — not phone answering. If you only want calls answered and booked, buy higher on this list.

Do these vendors store my patients' call recordings?

Almost none of them will tell you how long. Echo confirms recordings, transcripts and AI summaries are stored 'audit-ready' but publishes no retention period. Powervox explicitly logs, records and transcribes every AI call with no stated retention, storage location or deletion policy. Solara retains recordings with no published period. RingDental, KickCall AI, AiroDental, VoiceStack, Savvy Agents and Assort Health disclose nothing at all. ThirdVoice.ai is the only vendor making a flat 'no raw voice recordings stored' claim, though I found no privacy or security documentation substantiating it. Savvy Agents is the sharpest gap: it runs an operatory microphone for its Sia scribe and never says whether that audio is kept.

Can any of these also write my clinical notes?

Two of the ranked seven attempt it, and you should keep the categories separate. Savvy Agents' Sia is a genuine chairside scribe that sends an approved or attested note into supported charts with a mandatory review step. Solara's 'visit notes' are front-office summaries derived from calls and appointment data — not an operatory scribe — and whether they reach the Open Dental chart is undocumented. Echo, RingDental, AiroDental, KickCall AI and VoiceStack write call notes only. On accuracy: JMIR Medical Informatics evaluated 356 of 7,545 AI-generated notes and found omissions in 18 percent, hallucinations in 11.5 percent and accidental inclusions in 9.3 percent, so omissions ran about 1.6 times hallucinations. Provider review is not optional.

Is Weave an AI receptionist?

No. Weave is an all-in-one front-office communications platform that layers on your existing PMS — VoIP with Call Pop caller ID, two-way and bulk texting, reminders, online scheduling, forms, reviews and payments — with bi-directional appointment and demographic sync for Open Dental. Its AI answering product is TrueLark, which Weave acquired in 2025 and is folding in; TrueLark is priced separately and its own pages list no PMS integrations. Peerlogic likewise started in call analytics before adding a booking agent. All three are adjacent to this category rather than in it.

Best Open Dental AI Receptionist

Facts & pricing verified August 19, 2026

Disclosure: I practice dentistry, and I also build Intake.Dental, one of the products on this page. I have tried to be harder on my own than on anyone else’s, and it does not rank first here. Judge the reasoning, not the byline.

Every vendor in this category says the same sentence: “our AI answers your phone and books the appointment.” For an Open Dental practice, that sentence hides the only question that matters — does the agent write into your live schedule through the Open Dental API, or does it take a message that somebody at your front desk types in tomorrow morning? Both get sold as “AI receptionist.” Only one of them saves a person any work.

How Open Dental integration actually works

Open Dental serves API access through the eConnector, which runs on your own server. That is worth knowing before any demo, because it means the vendor’s booking capability depends on something sitting in your building, and your IT arrangement is part of the purchase.

Open Dental also publishes a public third-party vendor list with trust tiers, and it is the single most useful free document in this buying process. As of writing: 87 Authorized, 11 Authorized In Transition, 22 Dangerous/Unknown, 11 Not Currently Active, plus 14 Native Integrations. Dangerous/Unknown means direct database access or unwhitelisted plugins — a vendor writing into your tables underneath the API. Listing is free ([email protected]), so absence from the list is a signal, not a cost problem.

Contrast that with Henry Schein One, which requires SOC 2 Type II and OAuth 2.0 of its API Exchange vendors. Open Dental’s tiering is looser and cheaper to enter. Authorized status confirms the method is the API. It does not certify the depth or quality of the integration, and several Authorized vendors on this page never name Open Dental on their own websites.

I ranked on three things: does it write bookings into the live schedule, what is its Open Dental trust tier, and what can it not do.

1. Echo

The clearest answer to the decisive question. Open Dental lists Echo as Authorized, and Echo independently documents the mechanism — Open Dental’s REST API, scoped per practice through the native Developer Key system, which you can permission-limit or revoke. Its write-back description is the most specific here: it reads live schedule, providers and appointment types out of the system and writes appointments, reschedules, cancellations, new patients and call notes back in real time, into the correct hygiene or new-patient operatory with the right provider, procedure code and visit length.

It is one of only two vendors here that publishes a rate card at all. Starter is $499/mo ($449 billed annually) for 50,000 tokens; Growth is $1,999/mo ($1,799 annually) for 225,000 tokens. A token is $0.01, a call is 100 tokens — so roughly $1.00 per call, with overage at $0.01/token. What it cannot do: the economics do not curve smoothly. A practice at 1,200 calls a month overshoots Starter by ~700 calls and eats about $700 of overage, making the $1,999 tier a cliff rather than a step. Insurance checks (50 tokens) and forms (5) draw on the same budget, so “~500 calls” collapses if you use those. A one-time PMS integration setup fee exists and the amount is never published. Recordings and transcripts are stored “audit-ready” with no published retention period. The “notes” written to the chart are call notes — there is no ambient clinical scribe. Independent review coverage is thin.

2. Savvy Agents

Four named agents: Ira (reception), Sia (chairside scribe), Milo (insurance), Novi (recall). Open Dental lists it Authorized, and the vendor separately states it connects through the official Open Dental API — the two claims corroborate, which is rarer than it should be. Ira writes directly to the PMS with bidirectional sync; Sia sends an approved or attested note into supported charts with a mandatory human review step rather than silent auto-filing. Broadest dental PMS list here (14–15+ claimed).

What it cannot do: publish a price. Nothing on the homepage, nothing on the pricing page — every dollar figure in circulation is third-party inference. Stated terms are month-to-month with no setup fee or cancellation penalty, which is friendly if it holds. More seriously, there is zero audio retention disclosure for a product running an operatory microphone. Nothing published quantifies note accuracy, payer coverage or booking success, and the “15+ integrations” claim comes with no per-system capability matrix, so which of those support full write-back is unknown. On the note-accuracy question generally: JMIR Medical Informatics evaluated 356 of 7,545 AI-generated notes and found omissions in 18%, hallucinations in 11.5% and accidental inclusions in 9.3% — omissions run about 1.6x hallucinations. Assume review is not optional.

3. KickCall AI

The most explicit API language in the set: an official Open Dental integration partner using the official API, with concretely scoped writes — book, reschedule and cancel in Open Dental, with real-time sync. Authorized tier. It publishes per-PMS integration pages and also integrates at the telephony layer (RingCentral, Vonage, Zoom Phone, Google Voice), so you may keep your phone provider. HIPAA and PIPEDA stated.

What it cannot do: show you a price. Both /pricing and /plans return 404; a third-party comparison cites $59/mo for a basic after-hours use case with dental PMS workflows quote-only. It is silent on call-recording storage and retention. It is a horizontal product sold outside dentistry too, so dental depth is less certain. Note also that a competitor publicly markets against KickCall alleging it is a “Google Calendar bridge” rather than real PMS integration — that is adversarial marketing, it contradicts both KickCall’s own statement and its Authorized listing, and I would treat it as self-serving. But it tells you the claim is contested, so make them screen-share a booking landing in your Open Dental appointment module.

4. RingDental

Authorized, seven PMS systems named live, and fully public tiers including the overage rate: Starter $149 (250 minutes), Live $299 (500), Live+ $599 (750), $0.45/min over on all three. A BAA is included with every plan at no extra cost and explicitly not sold as an add-on — worth noting, because several competitors are silent on this.

What it cannot do: deliver booking at the advertised entry price. PMS integration is reportedly gated out of the $149 Starter tier, so the real floor for a practice that wants scheduling is $299. Minute allowances are modest and a busy line reaches overage fast. The vendor says appointments “write directly” to Open Dental without stating whether that is the official API — the Authorized listing implies it, but the marketing does not say it. Pricing figures conflict between the vendor site and third-party summaries, so re-verify at quote time. No disclosure at all on recording storage or retention.

5. AiroDental

Two products: Laine, the receptionist, and Saige, a staff-facing SOP/training/task tool with a free tier — genuinely unusual in this category. Authorized. Its write-back language names Open Dental directly: appointments are “written straight into OpenDental,” and bookings, reschedules and notes “flow straight into your PMS, no double entry.” Truly multichannel — voice, web booking, chat and two-way SMS under one agent. HIPAA-compliant with a BAA available.

What it cannot do: corroborate its own method. AiroDental never names the Open Dental API on its site; the API mechanism is confirmed only indirectly by Open Dental’s classification. There is no pricing page at all (404), and no third-party price point exists either, which suggests limited penetration. Narrowest PMS list of the dental-native group (four systems). No audio retention policy stated despite a demo UI that shows live transcripts. Saige is SOPs and tasks, not charting — the “notes” reaching the PMS are call notes.

6. Solara Dental AI

Built on SuperMIA’s MIA voice agent and, for our purposes, the most Open Dental-focused product here: Solara markets Open Dental sync exclusively. Authorized tier with explicit bidirectional write-back for bookings, reschedules and transfers. Published tiers — Essentials $149/mo billed annually (1,500 AI minutes), Pro $349/mo billed annually (5,000 minutes), Enterprise custom — plus a founding offer of two free months, no setup fee and a 30-day money-back guarantee. Explicit BAA, encryption in transit and at rest, full audit logging.

What it cannot do: be a scribe, despite “writes visit notes.” Those are front-office summaries derived from calls and appointment data, not an operatory recording of your exam, and whether they land in the Open Dental chart is undocumented. Metered minutes mean unpredictable overage. The wider PMS list belongs to the parent product, not Solara, and some of those are “soon.” Recordings are retained with no published retention period. Very new brand, no independent reviews located.

7. Intake.Dental

Disclosure again, because this is mine: I build this product and I practice dentistry. It ranks last on this page and I think that is correct for the question this page asks.

The AI receptionist answers calls and books into the live schedule; appointment create and read are supported on Open Dental and Dentrix Ascend. Pricing is published — AI Receptionist $499/mo, Practice Autopilot $799.99/mo bundling receptionist, clinical notes, PMS integration, unlimited verifications, payments and voice perio. Field-level PHI encryption at rest, BAA signed. Clinical depth is the real differentiator: notes file to the chart dated to the visit, voice perio captures probing depths hands-free and writes a new perio exam with probes to the PMS after provider review, and insurance eligibility writes coverage back to the chart. Dictation audio is never stored — memory only — with transcript text kept 24 hours purely so an interrupted dictation can be resumed; that window is a dictation behaviour, not a perio one. Separate opt-in, consent-gated recording features do store audio.

What it cannot do — and this is why it is seventh. It is not listed on any Open Dental vendor list, in any tier, while six vendors above it are Authorized. On Open Dental, appointment status updates and cancellation are not supported — those stay manual, which is exactly the workflow Echo and KickCall document. Open Dental commlogs have no provider field, so the provider’s name is written into the note body; that is not structured attribution, and I will not claim it is (Dentrix Ascend files against a real provider field). It does not read existing perio history back out of either PMS. Claims submission runs outside the PMS. Founded 2025, small installed base, no public review history. It holds no SOC 2 Type II. If your problem is purely “answer and book the phone,” buy from higher on this list. See the published pricing if the clinical side is what you are actually shopping for.

Vendors that are not receptionists — or not evidenced as Open Dental ones

Weave is a front-office communications platform layered over your PMS — VoIP with Call Pop, texting, reminders, forms, reviews, payments — not an AI phone agent. It does bi-directional appointment and demographic sync with Open Dental. Its acquired AI receptionist, TrueLark, is priced separately and is being folded into Weave; TrueLark’s own pages list no PMS integrations.
Peerlogic began in call analytics and added “Aimee” for missed-call text-back and booking; its integrations page names Opendental. Annie sells 24/7 AI reception that it says books directly into the PMS, but specific PMS names are unverified — for an Open Dental buyer that is a dealbreaker until they name it. Arini is a dental-specific AI phone receptionist whose homepage lists OpenDental, but that integration list is unverified against the vendor site and I found no Open Dental trust-tier evidence for it.
VoiceStack is Authorized and dental-only, but it is a VoIP phone system first; its own site says the AI “guides the patient to booking” and never plainly documents that the AI books into the PMS itself. Bearfoot AI is Authorized and is the only vendor here with SOC 2 Type II, but it is shaped as revenue-cycle recovery — balances, collections, payment plans — more than reception. Powervox ($349/mo per location, public, 14-day trial) is Authorized, but its dedicated Open Dental page only claims to “support booking conversations,” with the strong write claim living in homepage copy, and it explicitly records and stores every call with no retention policy. ThirdVoice.ai is the one vendor making a flat “no raw voice recordings stored” claim, but Open Dental lists it Authorized In Transition while it markets native API read/write — the claim outruns the classification. SmileDial is Canada-focused and never confirms anywhere that it writes appointments into the PMS.
Assort Health and IntelePeer are Authorized but medical-enterprise: neither names Open Dental on its own site, both are enterprise-priced (IntelePeer’s reported ACV is around $150K), and IntelePeer publishes no technical statement that it books into a dental PMS at all.

What to do in the demo

Ask for one thing: share your screen, take a call, and show me the appointment appearing in the Open Dental appointment module. Then ask three questions almost nobody answers on their website — how long do you keep the audio and the transcripts, is the write going through the API or the database, and can the agent cancel and change status, or only create. Also price the alternative honestly: Open Dental sells its own eServices bundle (Web Forms, Patient Portal, eReminders, eConfirmations, Integrated Texting, Web Sched), and if your real problem is confirmations rather than a ringing phone at 8pm, that is a cheaper starting point than any AI agent here.