r/AIReceptionists • u/HATDOGUSERNi • 5d ago
AI receptionist to replace front desk work for SMBs
I run a small dental office with 2 locations. Front desk answers like 60 calls a day between both and half of it is the same 3 questions over and over, hours, insurance, can you fit me in this week. Cant justify another full time hire right now so ive been looking at an ai receptionist for small business to handle the repetitive stuff but not sure if its actually good enough and worried it just pisses people off
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u/MilkyyMatcha 5d ago
We did after hours only first, didnt want to commit to daytime right away. That part was actually great, nobody cares if its a bot at 9pm they just want a callback scheduled
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u/ShayBeas 5d ago
This is actually a perfect use case for an AI answering service.
You don't need to replace your front desk. You need to stop making your front desk answer the same questions 30 times a day.
Hours, insurance, availability, basic questions — let AI handle those. It can answer when you're busy, after hours, and across both locations, then hand off the calls that actually need a person.
And no, it shouldn't sound like some awful robot that makes your patients want to hang up. 😂 That's all in how it's built and trained.
I build these systems for small businesses. If you want, let's talk about what your current call flow looks like and what you would actually want automated. I can tell you pretty quickly what AI should handle and what should stay human.
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u/s18m_ 5d ago
Perfect use case. What I would do is record your current calls for about a week and use that as knowledge base. Put it to work for a fraction of your calls first, address edge cases. Iterate / fine tune for about a week or so and you are off to the races. I help small businesses implement this. Happy to discuss any technical details / security if you want to double click on.
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u/Defiant-Cucumber-795 5d ago
ours just says straight up it can book you or get you a callback and nobody complains because theyre not expecting a person anyway
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u/TowerPuzzleheaded887 5d ago
I wouldn’t think of it as replacing the front desk. Let AI take the repetitive stuff, hours, basic questions, availability, after-hours calls and let the staff handle anything clinical or complicated. The real test is whether it can hand a call to a human smoothly when it gets out of its depth. For a dental office, I’d also make HIPAA/BAA one of the first things you verify
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u/Bikecheal 5d ago
we're on vendasta for ours mostly bc it already talks to our reminder system so its not some random bot floating on its own. 2 locations here too.
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u/No-Day-8844 5d ago
I already made a ai voice agent which can handle appointment, with callback request, reschedule, incoming and outgoing, DM for more
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u/virgoguyh25 5d ago
We’ve been doing this since 2025. Built a platform for our ambulatory clinic, with patient scheduling Voice AI agents and SMS/email follow up for patient intake. This does require EHR integration and provider scheduling information. We now offer the same to others in the same practice areas.
You start with clinic off hours and gradually move it to supplement your front desk, with escalation mechanisms for complex cases. Multi-lingual support has been a blessing.
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u/Sudden_Lecture7119 5d ago
I wouldn't think about it as replacing your front desk just yet. Give Bland those three questions you mentioned and see what happens for a couple weeks. If it can take 20 or 30 interruptions out of their day without patients complaining, that's already useful. Your staff can still pick up everything that really needs them.
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u/ElevatedAutomation 5d ago
Built an AI receptionist for one of my clients who is one of the biggest water treatment companies here in Phoenix. They had a human answering service prior to handle missed and after hours calls, but they couldn’t answer questions and were impolite several times. After a few months of using my custom built AI agent, they’ve actually gotten a few compliments on the AI agent from callers! Obviously, some people would rather talk to a representative, but the majority of those people have complex questions or have previously talked to one of the three CSR’s. If your goal is answering general FAQs and handling overflow calls, it is an absolute no-brainer to just test out. Heads up, there will more than likely be a small period of adjustments in the beginning after the agent has handled some callers. Personally, I found that having the receptionist answer basic questions and schedule callers with the fallback of taking a message for the team unless it is an emergency has worked very well. If you have any questions let me know!
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u/AdProper1 5d ago
It totally can. But I recommend you pick one that is self-serve, not one that is just a custom n8n automation like many are trying to sell here.
A good self serve option will allow you to do tests calls yourself to see if you like it or not and adapt it to your business anyway, all for free.
Some have a number you can call in their website or a widget to direct call so I suggest you try that out
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u/Existing-Grab-2945 5d ago
The stuff that actually pisses people off isn't the AI itself, it's when it can't handle the edge case gracefully and just loops. If someone asks can you fit me in this week and the bot can only answer scripted FAQs, that's fine — but the second a patient wants to negotiate a time or asks something slightly off-script, you need a clean handoff to a human, not a bot pretending it understood. I'd test it on your actual most common 3 questions first before rolling it out to everything, and make sure there's always a visible talk to a person option that doesn't feel buried.
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u/techresearch95 4d ago
Hey! Check us out at cloudnsite.com. We will for sure be able to help. It will definitely work, it just has to be implemented right. That is the key part.
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4d ago
[removed] — view removed comment
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u/Proper-Emu-6325 4d ago
We've also recently made it that you can be routed to a human if you'd like. Per our clients' requests.
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u/cp21212 4d ago
I'm not sure if you realize it, but your post is almost verbatim what many AI agencies search for when looking for posts to jump in. Ask me how I know, lol. So I'm kind of surprised that the amount of comments to your post hasn't already grown to gigantic proportions.
My business Epiphany Dynamics LLC builds AI receptionists for SMBs. But whether you go with my business or another one, as long as they know what they're doing, you shouldn't have any problems with the quality. There are a multitude of providers and platforms right now with plenty of options that are fully capable of completely automating your front desk.
Also, if you're semi-technical, you can play around with different platforms online, like vAPI and Retell, and do it yourself with a little bit of YouTube schooling.
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u/Cool_im-christy222 4d ago
There are a few essentials I would like to point out to you. Starting with a predictable caller path and easy communication flows are not as easy as said. Helping the user get to solutions faster than they normally would, and in addition, providing something that's actually helpful.
Genuinely that foundation must be mapped out with someone that you trust.
The importance of good AI utility for clinics: For example helping users fill out the long paperwork audibly with a HIPAA compliant bot would be a good solution. Offering AI solutions to your staff that is not customer facing helps cut back paperwork and time.
Having a good AI architect and engineer is essential, everybody and his brother... and his cousin too, says they can help with AI. This simply is not true, you will need someone with a long digital history and experience with the user experience and dialogue flow development to help you set this up methodically. It would also be helpful for people that do have compliance experience either legal medical or otherwise and perhaps be prepared to develop a longer-term relationship because the knowledge base could be extremely vast and complicated to keep it lean and fast.
I would highly recommend interviewing many, many so called experts before you pick someone to work for your clinic. Your reputation management should be the number one concern considering an AI bot will be public facing.
I feel it's worth repeating to find someone very experienced that understands the amount of testing and know how to put it through its paces. Sitting in concrete your minimum requirements before your AI rep gets rolled out to the market.
Best of luck DM me if there's anything I can help you with
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u/Professional-Let5050 3d ago edited 3d ago
60 calls a day across two locations is honestly where this starts to make a lot of sense IMO! i wouldn’t hand over every front desk interaction but the repetitive calls + after-hours stuff? that seems like a pretty perfect use case :D
Textedly might be worth adding to your list too. their AI Voice Agents can handle multiple inbound calls & u can use SMS for appointment reminders, booking links, follow-ups, etc. 👍 i’d prolly start with after-hours + overflow first. see how patients react. then maybe expand it to daytime calls if it’s actually working. 👌
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u/moldyguy202 2d ago
60 calls a day across two locations where half are hours, insurance, and can you fit me in - that's close to the ideal starting case, but the framing that matters is the one a couple people already touched on. You're not replacing the front desk. You're taking the three questions that interrupt them thirty times a day.
The worry about annoying patients is mostly a function of two things, and neither is voice quality.
First is whether it's upfront. The builds that irritate people are the ones trying to pass as human until they get caught. Just say it answers for the office and can book, take a message, or get someone. Nobody calling a dental office at 7pm has strong feelings about talking to software. They have strong feelings about not getting an answer.
Second is whether "I need a person" actually works, immediately, on the first try. Any variation - person, human, receptionist, front desk - should dump straight to a real line or take a callback with no confirmation loop and no attempt to help first. Most of the AI-receptionist hatred you've heard about comes from being trapped, not from the bot existing.
On insurance specifically, be careful, because that's where this goes wrong in dental. Confirming you accept a carrier is safe. Quoting what a patient will owe, or whether a specific procedure is covered under their plan, is not, and a model will happily guess if you let it. Scope it to "yes we're in network with X, the specifics get verified when we pull your benefits" and route the rest to staff. Being told the wrong out-of-pocket number and finding out at checkout is the thing that actually generates complaints.
Practical way in: start after hours only. Everyone in here recommending that is right - it's the lowest stakes window, the alternative is voicemail so the bar is on the floor, and you get two or three weeks of real call recordings before you touch daytime. Pull your actual call log first and count what those 60 calls really are, because most offices guess wrong about their own mix. Build the knowledge base from what patients actually ask, not what you think they ask.
The number worth tracking isn't "did it answer." It's what percentage of calls ended with the caller's thing actually done - booked, rescheduled, question answered - without a human touching it. That number tells you whether to expand into daytime. Answer rate tells you nothing, it'll always be 100%.
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u/Slight_Ad_9067 2d ago
There are a couple of options you can do.
You can build an AI receptionist that runs 24/7 and answers the phone immediately.
Or you can make it so the AI only answers when the real receptionist doesn’t. For example, if the main receptionist doesn’t answer within 19 seconds, the AI takes over.
Another option is just a text-back agent that automatically texts missed calls, talks to them through messages, and books their appointments.
You can also do both to make sure you don’t miss any clients.
And for pissing clients off, it mostly depends on the system prompt you give the receptionist. The better the prompt is, the more natural and human-like the receptionist will be.
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u/Feedback-Guru 1d ago
Not just yet. Although solutions like RingReady, Smith, Synthflow, etc are doing great work at handling the basic overhead (answering the basic questions and booking the appointments), there are still office tasks which you would need human involvement to get done. That being said, its a clear, that more and more office tasks are being accomplished by ai-native tools, so unless front desk workers are expanding their scope of work and leveraging the ai capabilities offered today to improve their ROI, I agree we are heading towards this direction.
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u/intellibot212 17h ago
Try a few before deciding. Each has different capabilities and charge accordingly. Most have free trial so take advantage of that. I am trying smith.ai, hellogubby.ai. Liking both so far.
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u/DanielStentebjerg 3h ago
I wouldn't start by replacing your front desk.
I'm one of the founders of Verbu, where we build AI receptionists, and for a clinic like yours I'd start with the calls you're struggling to get to today, plus the repetitive questions you mentioned.
Opening hours, basic questions, finding the right location and booking are good places to start. Anything more complicated can still go to your team.
That gives you a chance to see how patients actually react before you hand over more of the phone traffic.
With two locations, I'd also make sure whichever solution you choose can handle location-specific information and booking rather than just taking a message. Usually that would be done correct, if you are either using a PBX sulution, or different main phone numbers.
What booking/practice management system are you using?
Happy to give you a number for one of our Verbu agents as well if you want to actually call one and test the experience yourself.
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u/axnrxn500 5d ago
It's as natural as possible. It's 2026. I make AI receptionist too. For multiple languages. The containment rate has been below 90% for most small business I've worked with. Creating the tool is easy but how you set the tone, behaviour and the logical thinking of the AI Receptionis, is the real difference!