AI for medical practices · Dentists
An AI receptionist for a dental practice.
IndunAI is an AI dental receptionist for dentists in South Africa. It answers your patients on WhatsApp and your website, day and night, and books check-ups, cleanings and longer procedures at the right length in the right person's diary. Reminders go out on their own, a patient in pain is shown the soonest time or handed to your team, and it is designed to give no clinical advice on the way.
Nothing to sign up for. The live medical demo is a fictional general practice rather than a dental one, but the booking engine, the server checks and the AI notice are the ones a dental practice gets. Book something, move it, and watch the diary change beside the chat.
online, replies in seconds
My tooth is killing me, can I come in today?07:52
I'm sorry you're in pain. The dentist has 10:40 or 15:15 today for an emergency appointment. Which would you like?07:52
10:40Can I take something for it until then?07:53
You're booked for 10:40 today. What to take is one for the dentist, who will go through it with you then. If it gets much worse before then, let us know here straight away.07:53
An illustration, picked up after the practice's AI notice. The emergency appointment is a service the practice set up, and the times come from its own diary.
Recalls
Recalls and six-monthly check-ups.
The honest answer comes first. There is no recall feature as such: nothing keeps a list of the patients who are due and writes to each of them on its own, skipping the ones already booked. What is built gets most of the way there, and the first of these is surer than any recall.
Book the next check-up before they leave
The surest recall is the next appointment already in the diary. The patient can book it in the chat, or the desk adds it on the Diary board from a list of free times the server works out for that service, with the patient's cellphone number. The reminders then go out on their own, at the hours the practice chose and up to two weeks before, as an approved WhatsApp template, which is what lets them arrive months after the patient last wrote.
A re-booking nudge, sent by a person
Where the practice switches it on, the dashboard drafts a message each day for patients whose last visit is older than the gap you choose, six months among the options, and who have nothing booked. Nothing goes until somebody presses Send, and Meta only lets an ordinary WhatsApp message reach somebody who has written in the last 24 hours, so a patient who last wrote months ago can only be nudged by email.
A message six months on, in your words
A care plan on the check-up service can hold a message for any day up to a year after the appointment, written by the practice and sent on its own as an approved WhatsApp template. It is not a recall list: it goes to everybody who had that check-up, including anybody who has already booked the next one, so the wording has to allow for that.
A true recall would join the last two: the nudge's list of who is due, and a message that goes on its own. That is not in the product today. If recalls matter to your practice, tell us when we meet: it would be a build, scoped and priced with you after sign-up. Reminders themselves, the Yes and No confirmation that frees a cancelled slot and the waiting list that fills it, are on AI appointment booking for doctors.
Toothache
Emergencies go to a person.
Toothache does not keep office hours, and a patient in pain is the one message a practice least wants answered badly. The assistant's job here is narrow: get the patient to the soonest time or to a person, and say nothing clinical on the way.
In hours, today first
A patient who asks to come in today, or as soon as possible, is searched from today while today still has a free time, rather than offered next week. Where the practice keeps emergency appointments as their own service, with their own length, they are offered like any other.
Nothing clinical on the way
It does not say which painkiller to take, whether an antibiotic is needed, or that a swelling is nothing to worry about. On a dental practice a server check looks for that kind of sentence before the reply is sent, and words the practice has written about emergencies are used as written.
A person, when it needs one
A health practice is set up with instructions to tell somebody whose problem sounds urgent to get care now and to hand the conversation over at once, and any patient can ask for a person at any time. The hand-over reaches the practice's alert number with the conversation behind it.
Out of hours, the practice's own emergency line
When the practice is closed and a patient asks for the soonest time or reports an emergency, the reply is built in a fixed order: the emergency line the practice has written, then the first times the diary has for those who would rather wait, then what to do if it gets worse before the practice opens. Nobody has to be awake to read an alert for the patient to get that.
The practice can rewrite those three sentences, in English and in Afrikaans, so the emergency line can name the dentist on call or a colleague's practice. Until it does, the line sends the patient to the emergency services. A message about self-harm is never treated as a dental matter: it takes the crisis path, with the South African crisis lines and an urgent alert, set out on WhatsApp AI for doctors and clinics.
The diary
Chair time and appointment lengths.
A dental diary is a puzzle. A check-up, a scale and polish, a filling, a root canal and a crown preparation all take different amounts of chair time, and some belong to the dentist and some to the hygienist. Each of those facts is a setting the practice owns, so the assistant books around them instead of guessing.
Each treatment at its own length
Every service carries its own duration and is offered only on start times that suit it, so a long procedure is never squeezed into a short gap. After an appointment, the next time offered is the first one the practice's time grid allows, so a busy morning does not look full when it is not.
The dentist's diary and the hygienist's
Each person on the team can have their own calendar, and a service can be limited to the people who do it, so a scale and polish is offered only in the hygienist's diary. The server checks that restriction whatever the model proposes. Availability is read per person, not per chair: two chairs worked by one dentist are one diary.
Time to turn the chair around
A service can carry a few minutes of buffer, and the practice can have it sit after the appointment only, so the room is ready before the next patient is booked in. The buffer is drawn on the Diary, so the desk sees the time that is really held.
Notice, phone-only and paused
A treatment can ask for its own minimum notice. One the practice would rather arrange on the phone, a surgical extraction perhaps, is marked phone-only, and the assistant says so and gives the practice's number instead of booking it. A service can also be switched off while the hygienist is on leave, and back on without re-entering anything.
Families in one go
One cellphone often books for a whole family. Each person booked from it is a dependant with their own record, and where the practice switches it on for a service, the assistant asks how many people the booking is for and holds one block long enough for all of them.
Every one of those checks happens in the server, not in the model. How the server claims a time once, so that two patients never get the same one, is in AI booking, without double booking.
FAQ
Fair questions.
Can it send six-month recall reminders?
Not as a recall list: nothing keeps a list of who is due and writes to them on its own, skipping anybody already booked. Book the next check-up before the patient leaves and its reminders go out on their own, as an approved WhatsApp template. The re-booking nudge drafts a message for patients last seen more than six months ago with nothing booked, for somebody at the practice to send, by email where WhatsApp's 24-hour rule stops it. And a care plan on the check-up service can send the practice's own message six months on, to everybody who had that check-up, booked or not. If a true recall matters to you, we will scope it as a build.
What happens with a dental emergency?
In hours, a patient in pain who asks to be seen today is shown today's free times first, and a health practice is set up with instructions to hand anything urgent to a person straight away. The assistant is designed not to advise on painkillers, antibiotics or whether the pain can wait, and a server check looks for that kind of sentence before the reply is sent. Out of hours, the reply leads with the emergency line the practice has written, then the first times the diary has, then what to do if it gets worse before the practice opens.
Can the hygienist have a separate diary?
Yes. Each person on the team can have their own calendar, and a service can be limited to the people who do it, so hygiene appointments are offered only in the hygienist's diary and a crown preparation only in the dentist's. The server enforces that restriction whatever the model proposes. A returning patient is booked with the person they usually see where that person is free, and offered the choice where they are not.
Does it connect to our dental practice software?
Not today. It books into Google Calendar, a CalDAV calendar, GoHighLevel or the dashboard's own Diary. A connection to a particular practice system would be a separate build, scoped and priced per project. A practice that wants one system can switch on IndunAI's own practice side instead, with patient files, treatment notes and accounts coded with its own tariff list, though it does not submit medical aid claims electronically yet. The trade-off is set out in practice management software vs an AI receptionist, and the practice side on practice software for dental practices.
See the booking engine a dental practice would get.
The live medical demo is a fictional general practice with an invented diary, running the same assistant, the same server checks and the same AI notice. Ask it something clinical to see what it will not say. When you want it for your own practice, book a demo and we will go through your treatments, your team and your diary with you. The assistant is from R1 450 a month including VAT for up to 300 conversations, plus a once-off R2 500 setup; fully managed is R4 995 a month with setup included; WhatsApp's own message fees are Meta's and are separate.
The rest of the medical guides, and the other kinds of practice.