Prompting With Purpose: The Human Thinking Behind Our AI Dental Phone System

With our new time-saving, business-boosting app, DentalDial, understanding your customers has never been easier.

Our AI-powered app – designed to integrate seamlessly with Zoom dental phone systems - analyses practice calls and produces valuable insights into call-handling quality, as well as trends in treatments and concerns, and can produce task-lists to facilitate your business' efficiency and development.

It’s like having an extra (very organised) team member, quietly working in the background. 

It works beautifully - and this is not by accident. 

Demystifying the Black Box

"AI" can feel like a bit of a mystery. A black box. You drop in a transcript and out pops a polished summary, a sentiment score, a task list – as if by magic.  

But behind that “magic” is something more grounded: thorough testing, thoughtful design, and a lot of very intentional, very human work. 

Coming from a background in forensic linguistics, I’ve spent years analysing how meaning is constructed through words – not just what’s said, but how it’s said and why. This lens has been invaluable in shaping how DentalDial interprets messy, real-life conversations into something structured, accurate, and actionable. 

In this way, human judgment and analysis are still deeply embedded in how the app works – shaping what it listens for, how it interprets meaning, and what it chooses to highlight. 

Training the AI for our dental phone system

Getting an AI model to understand and interpret complicated, often fragmented, human interactions, is no small feat. Language is messy. Patients often refer to treatments in symptoms or feelings, not clinical terms. Prompting the model to interpret underlying intent (e.g. pain leading to extraction) helped, but had to be carefully bounded to avoid hallucination.  

What's more, from the general babble of a busy dental practice to interruptions and poor connectivity, call transcripts are often imperfect. It was necessary to train the system to thrive despite these conditions.  

That’s why DentalDial was trained on hundreds of anonymised dental call transcripts: real conversations, with all the quirks, hesitations, noise, and unpredictability of human speech. Understanding where it faltered – and where it succeeded – was vital to perfecting and streamlining its productivity, and to ensuring its reliability.  

To verify the AI's outputs, each transcript was carefully analysed through a linguistic lens – looking not just at what was said, but how meaning was constructed, implied, or negotiated. That insight directly informed how we refined our prompts and shaped the AI’s understanding of dental-specific interactions.  

Even before tweaking, the AI proved a keen and sharp assistant – accurately picking out concepts 85% of the time and treatments 81% of the time, and with over 62% of summaries being rated as “excellent” (and a further 21% as “very good”).   

However, this analysis revealed opportunities for improvement. For instance, in the first few trials, the AI became slightly overenthusiastic, and would output not only tasks for the "agent", but for the patient, too. A rework of the wording put the AI back in its place, ensuring that the task lists remained firmly on the side of the dental team – not the unsuspecting patient. 

This testing also allowed us to compile a large list of concepts and treatments for the AI to identify, with the wording of these being tested and tweaked until the AI became an expert on all things dentistry. Thanks to this in-depth testing, DentalDial possesses an impressive ability to not only pick up on topics that are explicitly discussed, but on potential treatments and implied concepts, too!  

The result is an engine that understands the rhythm and reality of client-business communication, and can increase practice productivity with its sharp, reliable insights.  

In Summary  

This might be an AI-powered app, but its "understanding" is based in real human insight, shaped by expertise in language, intention, and communication. 

At its core, DentalDial is about clarity. It’s about helping practices hear what’s really being said, spot patterns sooner, follow up faster, and improve the way they communicate, both with patients and within teams. Thanks to the rigour behind its training, DentalDial’s insights can be trusted to provide that clarity and, ultimately, to help boost your productivity.  

We believe the future of patient experience starts with listening. And AI, when guided by real human insight, can help us do that better than ever. 

If you're curious about what your calls are really saying – or how AI can make your practice more efficient, responsive, and informed – book a demo call today! 

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