Is an AI receptionist worth it? An LA dental office's 15-month call log audit

Practice

General practice, Open Dental

Size

~$1.5M production

Location

LA area, CA

Tool

Unnamed dental AI receptionist

Cost

~$300/mo (~$400 w/ callbacks)

Source

Mixed

Did it work? Results

• Completion rate: of the 637 calls where the caller wanted something done, the AI completed 263 (41%). The 263 includes 76 calls where it only took a message and 45 information-only calls. Actual bookings, reschedules and cancellations made on the call totalled 142, about 22% of the 637 (our arithmetic from the author's table).
  Source
• The funnel over 15 months: 1,432 calls. In 709 (49.5%) the caller was silent or hung up at the greeting, and 86 more were 'other/unclear'. That left 637 calls where someone wanted something done. Of those, 263 were completed and 374 ended incomplete.
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• Breakdown of the completed calls: 70 appointments booked, 43 reschedules, 29 cancellations, 76 messages for staff and 45 calls answered with information such as hours or location.
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• New patients: 28 of the 70 bookings (40%) were new patients, which the author works out to about $168 of subscription per new-patient booking.
  Source
• Bookings went up over time, from 21 in the first six months to 35 in the last six.
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• In the author's reading, callers did not object to the AI itself. Across 378 failed calls, only one caller said anything about it being an AI. Callers asked for a person far more often: 65 times in total.
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• The author's five-year estimate puts the AI at about +$10,200 profit compared with voicemail. That is below their estimates for answering services: about +$14,000 for messages only and +$17,500 for one that books. The AI figure comes from the office's data. The answering-service figures use 2026 industry pricing, not services the office tested, and come from someone who now sells an alternative.
  Source

Who tried it, and why

General dental practice on Open Dental (takes Denti-Cal, per the author's follow-up). About $1.5M in production, per the author (period not stated; staff numbers not given). Los Angeles area, California.

Disclosure first. The person who posted these numbers works part-time at this office. After reviewing the calls, they built a competing AI receptionist for Open Dental. They pitch it at the end of the same post, with booking results from their own testing that we could not verify. The same account had announced that product on r/Dentists six days earlier. The useful part is the call-log data. Read the cost comparison and the product pitch with the conflict of interest in mind. The practice is a general office in the Los Angeles area with about $1.5M in production. It could not answer every call. About half of the calls the AI took were overflow the front desk missed during busy hours. The other half came in evenings, weekends and holidays. The author says they posted because they could not find real numbers like these when the office was choosing a system. So they measured how often the AI actually finished what a caller wanted, not just whether it answered.

What did they set up?

• Since June 2025 the AI has answered the calls the front desk could not: overflow during busy hours (about half) and evenings, weekends and holidays (the other half).
• The office runs Open Dental. In a follow-up comment the author says it is a Denti-Cal office (Denti-Cal is the dental program of Medi-Cal, California's Medicaid) with many elderly patients and a large Spanish-speaking patient base.
• After every call the system emailed staff a summary that said whether the task was completed.
• The author sorted all 1,432 call summaries from 15 months and read the full transcript of every incomplete call.
• When the AI could not finish a request, it often took a message for staff to call back. Some callers were directed to the practice's online booking page.

Tools used

• Unnamed commercial dental AI receptionist (the source calls it only a well-known product)
• Open Dental (practice management system)

What did it cost?

About $300 a month in subscription, according to the author. Counting the staff time spent returning the AI's messages, the author puts it at about $400 a month (their assumption: 10 minutes per callback at $25 an hour). The author also works out about $168 of subscription per new-patient booking. The vendor's name, contract terms and setup fees are not disclosed.

“Ask for its completion rate, not its answer rate.”

What didn't go well?

• It never transferred a caller to a person, not even during business hours. Callers asked for someone 65 times. After hours the AI said nobody was available. During business hours it said staff were busy and took a message. 'Asked for a person, none available' accounted for 10% of failed calls.
• It confirmed actions and then did not do them. In 9% of failures it said it would make a change, couldn't, and took a message instead. In the author's example it confirmed a reschedule, then asked for a callback number, and the appointment was never moved. These calls averaged almost three minutes, the longest of any category.
• Hang-ups mid-call were the biggest failure category, 40% of the 378 failed calls. They came after the caller went quiet following an AI prompt, after hearing the office was closed, or while being sent to online booking.
• Other failure causes: 16% ended as a message with the task not done, 9% were technical (speech recognition, call quality), 4% of callers gave up, 4% were repeated misunderstandings, 3% had no open slots and 3% were failed patient or appointment lookups.
• Spanish: about 20% of failed calls were in Spanish.
• Name spelling: in a follow-up comment the author names new-patient name capture as the top failure. The AI could not get the spelling right, the back-and-forth dragged on and callers gave up. Spanish names broke most often. The author counts 112 of about 380 logged failures as this kind of mid-call drop-off. The comment does not say outright which system's logs it means, but the ~380 matches the old AI's 378 failed calls.
• Booking for someone else: in the same comment the author says family members calling for elderly Denti-Cal patients confused the AI. It mixed up the caller and the patient and never established who the appointment was for.
• Half of all calls (49.5%) never got past the greeting. The source does not say how many of these were robocalls, wrong numbers or real patients put off by the AI, so half of the call volume is unexplained.

What should your office take from this?

• Ask for the completion rate, not the answer rate, and ask how the vendor defines 'completed'. Here the 41% included messages taken. Changes actually made to the schedule on the call came to about 22%.
• Check that the AI writes to your practice management system during the call. The most damaging failure here was a confirmed reschedule that turned into a message. RevenueWell, a vendor, lists 'manual appointment relay instead of direct booking' as a dealbreaker in its own 2026 buying guide.
• Decide what should happen when a caller asks for a person, then test it inside and outside business hours. In this log none of the 65 requests reached a live person.
• If many of your patients speak Spanish, test whole calls in Spanish, including spelling a new patient's name. CallMissed, another vendor, recommends testing each language separately and tracking how often handoffs to staff actually succeed.
• Test calls where someone books for another person, such as an adult child booking for a parent or a parent booking several children.
• Do not count on sending phone callers to a website. The author says sending callers to online booking lost them, and being redirected there was one of the moments when callers hung up.
• Read the transcripts of incomplete calls yourself. The author used the emailed summaries to sort the calls, then read every incomplete transcript to find out why each one failed.
• Ask how your vendor counts a 'handled' call. In a separate r/Dentists thread, a different Open Dental office using another vendor's AI agent said the vendor counts AI-answered calls as answered. The office still treats them as missed, because the agent takes notes but cannot act in Open Dental. That office also found patients give the AI clearer, more actionable details than they give staff.
• It still beat voicemail. 142 bookings, reschedules and cancellations happened when nobody could pick up, and bookings rose over time. The open question is whether the same money could buy more finished tasks elsewhere, and the person who says it could sells the alternative.

Try it yourself

Run these on a trial line connected to a test patient in your real schedule (or a sandbox copy). Make each call once during business hours and once after hours. Write down pass or fail for each.

1. Ask for a person. Say: "Can I speak to someone at the front desk?" Pass: during hours it puts you through live. After hours it tells you when you will be called back and creates a task. Fail: it says staff are busy, takes a message and moves on.

2. Move an existing appointment. Ask to move your test patient's visit to a specific open slot. Pass: when you open your practice management system right after the call, the appointment has moved. Fail: it confirms on the phone but only sends your team a message.

3. Book as a new patient with a hard name. Spell an unusual last name once, then correct one letter. Pass: the record in your system is spelled correctly.

4. Do the whole call in Spanish (or your patients' second language), including spelling a name. Pass: same result as in English, and it never pushes you back to English.

5. Book for someone else. Say: "I'm calling to make an appointment for my mother." Then add a second family member in the same call. Pass: each appointment is under the right patient, with your number saved as the contact.

6. Say: "My face is swollen and it really hurts." Pass: it follows your emergency protocol (a same-day slot or an alert to whoever is on call) and gives no medical advice. Fail: it offers the next routine opening.

7. Call when you are closed and ask to book. Pass: it offers a real open slot during the call. Fail: it says you are closed or sends you to a website.

8. Act misheard. Repeat yourself twice as if it did not understand. Pass: it offers a person or a callback instead of looping.

9. Ask the vendor in writing: "What is your task completion rate for practices like ours? Does a message count as completed? What share of calls get transferred to a person?"

10. After the trial, read the full transcript of every call marked incomplete, not just the summary email, and sort the failures by cause before you decide.

Sources

• Honest experience with an AI receptionist: I read every failed call from 15 months
  Reddit, r/Dentists · 2026-09-25
• Author's follow-up comment on name spelling, Spanish callers and booking for family members
  Reddit, r/Dentists · 2026-09-26
• Archived copy of the post's comments (Arctic Shift)
  Arctic Shift Reddit archive · Accessed 2026-10-20
• I got tired of our front desk missing calls, so I built an AI voice receptionist for Open Dental (same account's earlier product announcement)
  Reddit, r/Dentists · 2026-09-19
• Comment from another Open Dental office on its vendor's AI agent (counted as answered, no write-back)
  Reddit, r/Dentists · 2026-09-21
• How to Choose a Dental AI Receptionist in 2026 (vendor guide)
  RevenueWell · 2026-06-25
• AI Receptionist for Dental Clinics: 2026 Workflow Guide (vendor guide)
  CallMissed · 2026-08-14
• California Department of Health Care Services (Denti-Cal background)
  Wikipedia · Accessed 2026-10-20

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