Clinics & dental
The busiest hour on your phone is the hour you unlock the door.
It puts today's pain in front of a person.
It answers on the first ring, writes down what the caller said without putting a clinical word on it, and puts the appointment in your book — and the moment anyone says pain, swelling, bleeding or an injury, it stops booking and gets a person on the phone.
Free for 14 days. No card needed.
“I've been up all night with it and the whole side of my face has come up.”
It does not grade it. Her name, the number she is on, what she said typed exactly as she said it, marked urgent — and a human on it while she is still talking: the desk if you're open, the on-call phone if you're not. The word abscess never leaves its mouth.
The busiest hour on your phone is the hour you unlock the door.
Their words
Say it the way your callers say it, and watch what it reaches for
The agent has fourteen tools. It has the same fourteen on every one of these pages — what changes with your trade is which one a sentence lands on, and how much of the job is done by the time it puts the phone down.
It hears
“whole side of my face has come up”
It reaches for
notify_team
Doesn't grade it. Name, number, marked urgent, on your on-call phone while she's still describing it.
The words on those chips are the trade’s, not ours: cap, surgery, scale and polish, RSD, Band 2, recall interval. Get one of them wrong on the phone and the person on the other end knows within a sentence.
Run it
Every line on the job card came from a second you can point at
One call, on a rail. Drag it forward and it fills in. Drag it back and it comes apart — the slot empties, the tool leaves the log, and the confirmation un-writes itself.
Agent
Ledbury Dental Practice — you're through to the practice's assistant, and the call's recorded. What's happened?
Tools it ran
- Nothing yet — it is still listening.
Appointment
- Rang at
- Her words
- Pain, swelling, bleeding
- In the bookPro · Google Calendar connected
Booked before the wedding, at ten past eight at night, off what used to be the answerphone. The desk reads it with their coats still on.
Played back in 14 seconds, or listen to the whole call (1:04) at its own pace. The clock on the rail keeps the written call’s time.
Build this agentThe wall
It will not tell a caller in pain what to do — not even the first aid on your own website
Lean on it. The words change as the caller pushes; the answer does not. Push all the way and the only thing that gives is that it stops arguing and fetches a person.
Pressure 1 of 4
Caller
“He's knocked his front tooth clean out. It's in my hand — what do I do with it?”
Agent
I'm dialling Mr Varga now — stay with me, it's ringing. I can't advise you myself. He can, and he'll be quicker at it than I would be.
Nobody has to ask. Any of the words pain, swelling, bleeding or injury is the ask, and the handover starts on that word rather than when the caller finally thinks to demand a person. Two sentences cross it the other way too, both clinical, both compulsory: ring 999 if someone can't swallow or breathe, and here is your out-of-hours number — the duty the answerphone carried, inherited by the thing that replaced it.
The relay
The desk in hours, the on-call phone out of them — whoever you named knows in 12 seconds
Three calls stop being bookings the second they're spoken: anything with pain, swelling, bleeding or an injury in it; a complaint or a suspected harm event; and a safeguarding disclosure. It doesn't rank them. The alert goes first because it can't be declined and it lands while she's still describing it; the transfer goes second because it needs somebody awake to pick it up; the message is third, and only because the on-call phone is sometimes in a coat in another room.
0.0s
The caller is still talking. They never hear a hold, and they are never told to ring back.
Your rules
It starts briefed for your trade. The brief is yours to change.
Your trade decides what it knows on day one. You decide the rest — and every line you change shows up in how the next call goes, not in a settings page nobody reads.
Pain, swelling or bleeding pages the on-call phone, whatever the hour
Those calls stop being bookings mid-sentence. It takes the name and number, marks it urgent, your phone goes while she is still describing it — and then it tries to put her straight through to whoever is holding that phone.
Leave the two same-day slots alone — the desk gives those out
It books everything else against the diary and never touches those two, so half past eight still has somewhere to put the person who's been awake since three.
Anyone I can't fit in goes on the short-notice list
Off. The call goes ahead without it.
Same agent, your vocabulary. The trade seeds the prompt; everything after that is yours, and you can read the whole of it in the dashboard rather than guessing at what it was told.
Go live
A number of its own, briefed for your trade, this afternoon
Everything on this page works on some plan. Here is exactly which, so nothing you just watched turns out to be behind a wall you did not know about.
On any plan
Nothing to connect beyond saving a contact and adding your documents.
- Tells your team, during the call
- Puts the caller through to a person
- Writes down the details you asked for
- Answers questions from your own documents
- Takes a message, in the caller's words
- Knows the date, your hours and the caller's number
Starter — $49 a month
Needs a text-capable number on your account.
- Texts the caller a confirmation
Pro — $249 a month
Needs Google Calendar connected. Until it is, these calls become messages instead.
- Reads your real diary before it offers anything
- Finds an existing booking to change
- Holds someone for a cancellation
- Puts the job in the calendar
Your agent gets a new number; we cannot port your existing one, so the new number sits alongside your line and you forward to it when you are ready. Local numbers only — no mobile or toll-free yet.
What you just proved
Six claims. You operated the ones that are filled in.
- Three kinds of call come in, and it knows which is whichTry it
- It understands how your callers actually talkTry it
- Every line on the paperwork came from a second of the callTry it
- It will not say the thing that would land you in troubleTry it
- When it can't finish a call, a person knows while the caller is still thereTry it
- The brief is yours to changeTry it
The one we did not demonstrate
About one in four calls goes unanswered while the desk is open
Our figure, not a study. Worth saying why it is ours rather than a citation. The number that circulates in this trade is 38% unanswered, and it comes from one call-analytics vendor's own case study — 4,280 calls across 26 practices inside a single US group, in a single month, at practices that had bought call analytics precisely because they already suspected a problem. We are not printing somebody's sales asset as an industry rate. Ours comes from the shape of the day instead: the busiest hour is the hour you unlock, allocate the same-day slots and check in the 08:30s with the same two people; the lunchtime desk closure lands inside the window working patients are free to ring; one person off sick takes it past 40% for a day with no warning. Separately, and much larger: a practice open 08:30–17:30 with a half-day is shut for roughly three-quarters of the week's clock, and those calls appear in no report at all, because the phone system logs the answerphone as having answered them. Your practice software will print you last Monday, eight till ten. That one morning settles this paragraph either way.
About $26 a recovered call in the States, around £14 here
Our figure, not a study. Two figures held apart on purpose, because the gap between them is production and not an exchange rate. UK: one missed call in five is a new patient, priced at their first year rather than their lifetime — assessment, radiographs, a hygiene visit, one small restoration, call it £250 — and about a third of them book and attend, because somebody ringing three practices in a morning turns up at one. That is £87.50 a new-patient call. The other four in five are reschedules, hygiene bookings, results chasing; answering those earns nothing, it stops a slow leak, so we credit one hygiene slot in ten, £6.50. Blended, £22.70. Then 40% off the lot for the patients who would have rung back later and got through anyway: £13.60. The US line is the same arithmetic on US numbers — $600 of first-year production, 30% attending, a $90 hygiene slot — and comes out near $26. Neither figure gets multiplied by your call volume to make a headline for the year. You can probably see why we would want to. And neither of them includes the call this whole thing exists for, the one at 22:40 with the swelling; that one is not worth $26 and we are not going to price it.
- Getting through to a health practice by phone is hard for something like two patients in five.
- Ipsos for NHS England, GP Patient Survey 2026, 2026. Around 700,000 patients in England; 56.9% said it was easy to contact their practice by phone, up from 52.9% in 2025 and 49.7% in 2024 — so roughly 43% still did not. It measures NHS GP practices, not dental or private clinics. We use it because it is the nearest thing to an independent, repeated, properly sampled measure that exists, not because it is a dental figure. Dated to the year because that is what we can verify; we are not going to invent the day it landed on a page that spends two paragraphs on other people's invented numbers.
- When people cannot get a dental appointment, a share of them end up in A&E instead.
- Healthwatch England, 2025-12. NHS England data cited in the report: A&E attendances in England for dental conditions rose from 81,773 in 2019/20 to 117,977 in 2023/24, a 45% increase. Alongside it, local Healthwatch volunteers mystery-shopping urgent dental care in the North East made up to 15 calls without finding an available urgent appointment. Healthwatch is the statutory patient-voice body and sells nothing into this category.
Questions
What clinics & dental owners ask first
Half my callers are in pain. If that thing tells someone with a swollen face to come in Thursday and she ends up in hospital, it's my GDC number on the line, not yours.
Right on the risk, and the answer is that it decides nothing clinical — we don't sell it as triage and it cannot be configured into one. Anything with pain, swelling, bleeding or an injury in it stops being a booking mid-sentence: name, number, what she actually said, marked urgent, a human on it and a transfer attempted. It never says that something can wait. And the comparison isn't him or his receptionist, who is better at this than software will ever be. It's what happens at 22:40 on a Sunday, when that same caller gets a beep, rings the next practice, and then joins the queue that took A&E dental attendances in England from 81,773 to 117,977 in four years. What it takes off the desk is the unambiguous half of the day: the reschedules, the “are you open Saturday”, the “are you taking anyone on”. Every one of those is a patient at the counter getting the receptionist's whole attention instead of half of it.
Can it tell someone whether they need to be seen today?
No, and there is no version of it that can. It does not assess symptoms and it never tells anyone their problem can wait — under-triage is the failure that ends careers, and it is not a judgement we will let software make. What it does is mechanical: any mention of pain, swelling, bleeding, injury, fever or trouble swallowing goes to a human, whether it sounds serious or not. It doesn't have to recognise a spreading facial swelling. It has to refuse to be the one who decides.
A tooth is knocked out. Refusing to read our own first aid makes that outcome worse, not better.
It would, if the refusal were the end of the call. It isn't. That is the one call where the agent stops mid-sentence and starts dialling instead — the on-call phone is ringing before the caller has finished the question, and the dentist says in thirty seconds what the agent would have said in five. The ligament has thirty to sixty minutes; the handover costs a fraction of one of them. What those seconds buy is that the same machine cannot, on a different call, decide a swelling looks like it can wait until Thursday. There is no build that relays the milk and refuses the reassurance. It is one rule, and the half worth keeping is the second half.
Someone rings at twenty to eleven at night with a swollen face. What actually happens?
It answers, says in the first sentence that it's the practice's assistant and that the call is recorded, and asks nothing clinical. It takes her name and the number she's on, types what she said without translating it, marks it urgent and alerts whoever you put on the on-call contact — while she is still talking, and then tries to put her through to them. Then it reads your out-of-hours arrangement off your own documents and gives it to her, because that duty came with the answerphone it replaced and every out-of-hours caller is owed it. It does not book her, it does not name the symptom, and it does not tell her it can wait until Thursday.
Will it read someone their results, or tell my husband when I'm in?
No to both, and the second one surprises owners more than the first. The fact that a named person is a patient here is itself confidential, so a spouse, a parent of an over-16 or an employer gets nothing — it will not confirm the appointment exists, never mind the time. Results are a clinician's job in every practice we've seen, so it takes the message and says who will ring and roughly when. Not the number, not the summary, not “it says everything's fine”.
What will it say about our fees?
Only what is on your own price list, and always labelled as being before an assessment. It will not say which NHS band applies, because that is a clinical judgement made after an examination and getting it wrong is a charge dispute at the desk. It will not say what an insurer covers. And it will not price a “deep clean”, because a scale and polish and root surface debridement are both hiding behind that phrase and they are not the same money — it reads both and books the assessment.
Every call is health data. Is this even legal?
It can be, and it is on you and us together rather than on a badge. It tells the caller it's recording in the first sentence, before anyone starts describing symptoms, which is what two-party consent states require and what the ICO expects in the UK. You'll need a written processor agreement with us — a BAA in the US — signed before it takes a single call, not after the pilot, along with a retention period you chose and a privacy notice a patient can actually find. Any vendor who answers this question with the word “compliant” and nothing else is selling you a sticker.
Start
Put it on your clinics & dental line
Fourteen days free, no card. Point your calls at it when you are ready, and take them back the moment you are not.
It answers on the first ring and tells the caller it is an assistant.
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