Live voice restorative charting for Open Dental. Think ChatGPT Voice for charting

[notsosuperman1]

Hey all! I'm Gabe Proulx, both a general dentist and registered Open Dental developer. I founded Soulware Studio to craft beautiful software, and built Dental Scribe to solve one of the biggest pain points of all dental EHRs: getting existing, planned, and referred treatment into the chart accurately and quickly.

I've been working on this for about 10 years. I posted here several years ago with a script that let you type conditions into the chart quickly. It helped, but you still had to type, and it depended on fragile UI automation to get things into OD. With the recent improvements in AI and voice recognition, plus a real Open Dental API integration, I have finally solved this the right way, with a native Windows app that can be set up as a Program Link in Open Dental.

One click from the patient's chart, and in a second you can start talking the way you'd talk to your best assistant. Treatments show up live in a slim banner while you work. Its always on top, so I often pull up the intraoral scan and radiographs and breeze through all the existing and planned treatments on patients in my office before even entering the room. You or an assistant can confirm or correct treatment in the moment, because they pop up in real time.

That's the main difference between Dental Scribe and other voice tools that record the whole appointment and then generate structured treatments after you stop. There are painfully few solutions for charting, but finally a few are popping up. But they haven’t tackled this problem in a way that is reliable enough to fit your workflow. Overjet's recent voice charting launch records the full appointment (because it is bolted on to their clinical notes solution), then does speech-to-text, and only shows you recognized treatment at the very end of the appointment. By then it’s too late to remember whether #7 was a DIFL or a DL, and it’s easy to miss that it charted #4 as needing a crown instead of #14. Dental Scribe works live during the exam, and changes or corrections can be made by voice or click.

Another difference is that I'm not running speech-to-text and then extracting treatment from the transcript. That workflow is essentially whisper-down-the-lane. Dental Scribe uses multimodal voice input into an agent that then updates structured treatment as you talk. You can also customize the treatment catalog deeply, so it charts the way your best assistant would.

It harnesses OpenAI's latest voice models, so the core intelligence isn't something I'm trying to invent from scratch as a small company. When OpenAI ships the next model, I can swap it in within a day. The ability to adapt it to any office comes from a treatment catalog you control, built by a dentist who still practices full time and also has a computer science background (me). I think that mix is hard for large dental AI companies to match, and we see it already on their solutions for AI clinical notes. They get close, but the last mile of office fit is where they usually stall.

Each office has its own customizable catalog with defaults, companion codes, and free-form tips. The stock catalog includes most treatments, but obscure ones start toggled off, so you turn on what you actually use and keep the agent focused on what your office uses. You can make it so every crown comes with a core planned, or the other way around, so you can trust Dental Scribe follows your defaults just like the assistant that has been with you for years. Bundled and dummy codes can be attached to specific treatments (like a crown seat code, or a PA with every extraction). There is a space for free-form tips to handle the less deterministic stuff, like Default diagnosis for crowns is Caries unless I am also planning a root canal on the tooth, in which case use Endodontically Treated. All of these customizations get converted into a unique prompt that the AI follows for your office, and also gets used as an error-checking fallback. So you can enable PFM crowns for existing, but disable for treatment planned, and even if the AI agent tries to add a treatment-planned PFM, it gets an error when Dental Scribe checks it against your catalog, and then can self-heal and try again.

When you're done charting and everything looks good, one click writes CDT codes, diagnoses, per-procedure notes, and accessory codes to the patient chart through the supported Open Dental API.

The audio never gets recorded, and never even goes through Dental Scribe’s servers. It gets routed straight to OpenAI on a zero-data-retention endpoint. In fact, we don’t have access to any PHI at all. I’ve got a BAA with OpenAI, and I sign a BAA with you.

I use it in my own practice. It's about 2-3x faster than assistant-driven entry. It's worked better than the other voice charting products I've tried. It's $149 per office per month with unlimited providers.

You can download it for free and test it in a few minutes, even on a home machine. If it's a fit, subscribe to easily connect Open Dental. It takes about 20 minutes to set up and link to Open Dental (other than the wait for me to generate an API key that pops up in the app when you are ready). All setup is on your time, through your computer. No demo call, no hidden pricing.

Demo Video: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=QcftVCZ5Ymk
Site: https://dentalscribe.soulware.studio/

Feel free to ask questions here. If Jordan or anyone from the Open Dental team is reading, I'd love to talk about becoming a featured third-party app. I'm just up the road from you guys and would be happy to come down for a visit.

My goal as a solo developer is to honor clinician and assistant time, craft insanely good software, ship fast, stay lean, and price disruptively so dental technology moves forward. If I can unlock you and your staff to work at the top of their licenses, we all win: you, your patients, me.

I'd appreciate any support that you feel this is worth: try Dental Scribe, give feedback, share it, post about it in Facebook groups. If I can get enough support from the community, I’d prefer to stay with a deep integration in Open Dental, rather than the approach of other software companies that go for broad but shallow integration. I'm really looking forward to people trying this. Next up, I'm working on voice perio charting and clinical notes so offices don't need as many separate subscriptions.

Thank you!