It's 4:50 on a Thursday and your orthodontic front desk is buried. A parent is checking out two siblings after their adjustment, the consult coordinator is mid-presentation in the next room, and the phone is ringing — a new lead who saw your Invisalign ad and wants to know if you take their insurance. Nobody can grab it, so it rolls to voicemail. By the time someone listens to the message the next morning and calls back, that parent has already booked a free consult with the ortho two towns over. Your Dolphin Management schedule had open consult blocks the whole afternoon; the problem was never your availability, it was that the phone outran your front desk.
DentalReception AI answers that call in under two rings, captures the new-patient details, answers the basic insurance question, and books the consult — all while the caller is still on the line. It works around your existing Dolphin Management workflow so a ringing phone stops costing you starts.
Books live, 24/7, working alongside Dolphin Management
DentalReception AI is an AI receptionist built for dental and orthodontic practices. It answers every call instantly, day or night, and completes the booking, reschedule, cancellation, or emergency routing during the call instead of leaving a message for someone to handle later.
For practices on Dolphin Management, DentalReception AI connects via API to work alongside your existing system so new-patient consults, exam calls, and recall requests get captured and scheduled without your team re-keying everything by hand. The agent collects the caller's name, reason for the visit, referral source, and insurance details, then hands a clean, structured record to your front desk. (TODO: confirm integration depth — real-time two-way write-back into the Dolphin Management appointment schedule is on the roadmap and not yet independently confirmed.) What is confirmed today is DentalReception AI's own behavior: it never drops a call, it captures every lead in a structured form, and it routes the booking to your team in the format they already work from.
That matters most for orthodontics, where a single new start is worth far more than a routine hygiene visit and where consults are the top of your whole funnel. Missing the call that would have become a $5,000+ treatment plan is the most expensive thing a busy front desk can do.
What Dolphin Management users get
- Every consult call answered — new-patient and Invisalign inquiries get picked up in under two rings instead of hitting voicemail during adjustments or check-outs.
- Structured lead capture — name, referral source, reason for visit, and insurance carrier are collected on the call and delivered to your team, ready to drop into Dolphin Management.
- After-hours and weekend coverage — parents who can only call after work or on a Saturday reach a live-sounding agent that books or schedules a callback. See after-hours answering.
- Reschedule and cancellation handling — when a parent calls to move an adjustment, the agent captures the change and offers the freed slot to the next caller. See appointment rescheduling.
- Bilingual answering — English and Spanish callers both get handled, so a language barrier never costs you a start. See multilingual answering.
How DentalReception AI connects to Dolphin Management
Setup is a forwarding change plus a one-time configuration of your providers, appointment types, and consult workflow — no new hardware and no rip-and-replace. You point your main or after-hours line to DentalReception AI, we configure the agent to match how your practice books, and it begins answering and capturing appointments to route into your Dolphin Management workflow. Your existing phones, doctors, and scheduling rules stay as they are. See implementation.
You decide how much of the phone load the AI carries. Some ortho practices forward only after-hours and overflow calls so the front desk keeps its daytime relationships; others route everything and let the team focus on patients in the chair and consults in the room. Either way, you can change the routing whenever you like.
Before and after DentalReception AI
| Before DentalReception AI | With DentalReception AI + Dolphin Management | |
|---|---|---|
| Missed & after-hours calls | Roughly 1 in 3 go unanswered (industry average) | Answered in under two rings, 24/7 |
| When a consult is captured | Later, after a voicemail callback | During the call |
| New-patient details | Scribbled on a sticky note | Structured record routed to your team |
| Cancelled adjustment slots | Sit empty | Offered to the next caller |
| Spanish-speaking callers | Often lost | Handled in their language |
Every call is handled under a HIPAA-compliant setup with a signed BAA available — see security.
Frequently asked questions
Does DentalReception AI write appointments directly into Dolphin Management?
DentalReception AI connects via API to work alongside Dolphin Management and captures each booking, reschedule, and cancellation as a structured record routed to your front desk. Real-time two-way write-back directly into the Dolphin Management appointment schedule is on our roadmap and not yet independently confirmed (TODO: confirm integration depth). What is confirmed today is that the agent answers every call, captures complete consult and insurance details, and delivers them to your team in a format that's fast to enter — so no lead is lost to a missed call, even before deeper write-back is live.
Is it built for orthodontics specifically?
Yes. DentalReception AI handles the calls that matter most to an ortho practice — new-patient consult inquiries, Invisalign questions, adjustment reschedules, and recall — and it's tuned to capture referral source and treatment interest, which drive your start funnel. See our orthodontics solution for how it fits a consult-driven practice, and book more new patients for the lead side.
What happens to calls after hours or on weekends?
They get answered and booked or scheduled for follow-up. DentalReception AI runs 24/7/365, so a parent calling after work or on a Saturday reaches the agent in under two rings instead of voicemail. The consult details are captured and waiting for your team when they're back at the desk, so Monday doesn't start with a backlog of missed leads.
How long does setup take?
Most practices are live quickly because there's no new hardware. It's a phone-forwarding change plus a one-time configuration of your providers, appointment types, and scheduling rules. You choose whether the AI handles all calls or only after-hours and overflow. See implementation for the steps, or book a demo to watch a consult call get captured live.
What does it cost?
DentalReception AI is a flat monthly subscription per location — far less than a part-time front-desk hire (roughly $2,500–$3,500/mo loaded by industry averages) and without the per-minute billing of an answering service that can only take a message. Given that a single orthodontic start is worth thousands, recovering even a few missed consults a month pays for it many times over. See pricing for the current rate.