Dental Virtual Receptionist and Answering Service
Every missed call is an empty chair.
Frontly answers 24/7 and books the patient before they try another clinic.
The short answer
What is Frontly's dental virtual receptionist?
Frontly is an AI dental virtual receptionist and answering service for Australian practices. It answers every patient call 24/7, books and reschedules appointments, and on the Pro plan runs outbound recall campaigns to fill the chair, capturing every booking in your Frontly dashboard. Flat monthly rate, no commitment beyond the plan you pick.
THE PROBLEM
Missed Calls Mean Empty Chairs
21x
better odds of qualifying an enquiry when you respond within 5 minutes rather than 30. A patient who reaches voicemail waits a lot longer than that.
Source: MIT / InsideSales Lead Response Study, 2007
51%
of online bookings on HotDoc, an Australian booking platform, are made between 5pm and 9am, when your front desk has gone home.
Source: HotDoc, 2019
Instant
Frontly answers the moment the call comes in. Every call answered before patients hang up and book elsewhere.
HEAR IT FOR YOURSELF
Your AI Agent Is Ready to Talk
Call our AI agent right now. It'll handle a patient appointment booking, just like it would for your practice. No signup required.
Test Call
Talk to the AI agent right now from your browser. Hear exactly how Frontly will sound for your business.
HOW IT WORKS
No Disruption to Your Practice.
Connect Your Phone
Forward your existing practice line or get a dedicated AI number. No hardware changes needed.
Customise the Prebuilt Workflow
Start from the prebuilt receptionist workflow and add your appointment types, practitioner availability and how your practice operates in the visual builder, then test it before going live.
Go Live
Frontly answers every call, books appointments into your schedule, handles cancellations, and sends patient reminders automatically.
WHAT FRONTLY HANDLES
Every Dental Call, Handled
From new-patient bookings to after-hours emergencies, Frontly answers the calls your front desk can't get to, and on the Pro plan makes the recall calls too. Flat monthly rate, every booking captured in your Frontly dashboard, and your existing software connected during onboarding.
New-patient bookings
Captures the caller's name, contact details, and reason for visit, then books the first suitable appointment straight into your Frontly dashboard.
Reschedules and cancellations
Handles changes 24/7, updates the booking, and frees the slot so your team can offer it to someone on the waitlist.
Recall and reactivation campaigns (outbound, on Pro)
Outbound-calls your 6 and 12-month recall list at scale, books the next hygiene visit, and logs every outcome.
After-hours dental emergencies
Triages pain and trauma calls, captures the details, and escalates genuine emergencies to your on-call number straight away.
Fees and general enquiries
Answers common questions about fees, health-fund cover, location, and opening hours so your front desk isn't interrupted mid-treatment.
Visual Workflow Builder
Script Your Front Desk Without Code
Start With a Prebuilt Receptionist Workflow
Every plan includes a prebuilt receptionist workflow. You add your appointment types, your practitioners and your hours, and choose exactly what the AI asks before it books a chair.
Emergency Triage You Define
You decide what counts as urgent. A knocked-out tooth reaches your on-call practitioner; a whitening enquiry books normally.
New Patient Versus Existing
The script separates a first-time caller who needs qualifying from an existing patient moving an appointment.
Change It Yourself
Adjust practitioner availability, appointment lengths, or the questions asked, any time, without waiting on us.
Intelligent Branching
Route by appointment type, practitioner, or time of day, so an after-hours emergency never follows the same path as a routine check-up.
Cross-Call Memory
Your AI Remembers Every Patient
- Existing patients recognised the moment they call
- Previous appointments and preferences recalled automatically
- No asking a returning patient to explain their history again
- Full call history on every patient before your team picks it up
Frontly Dashboard
Every Booking Captured While Your Team Is Chairside
Every Appointment In One Place
Bookings land in your Frontly dashboard with the appointment type and patient details already captured, so your front desk actions them between patients.
Full Transcript on Every Call
Read exactly what the patient described, so the practitioner knows what is coming before they sit down.
Emergency Alerts to Your On-Call
Configure an SMS or call the moment a genuine dental emergency is confirmed, day or night.
Cross-call History at a Glance
Every previous call from that patient, with the outcome already tagged.
Live Status Across the Practice
See what came in while the whole team was chairside, on one screen.
Outbound Campaign Manager
Fill the Chair With Recalls and Reminders
Recall Campaigns at Scale
Frontly calls the patients overdue for a check-up and books them back in, work your front desk rarely has time to do.
Appointment Reminders
Reduce no-shows by calling patients ahead of their appointment and capturing whether they still intend to come.
Same Builder, No New Tool
Script the campaign with the same drag-and-drop builder you used for inbound.
See What Landed
Track which recall lists actually filled chairs, so you know which to run again.
INTEGRATIONS
Works with the software dental already runs on
Connect your AI receptionist to the software your team already uses, so Frontly can check availability, manage bookings and capture caller details as part of your reception workflow.
Health, dental and allied health
Zanda
Cliniko
Nookal
Halaxy
Needs the Halaxy API subscription, a paid add-on
Dentally
Core Practice
Dental4Windows
Healthengine
Team messaging
Integrations support Frontly's reception and caller follow-up workflows. Available actions depend on the connected software and your setup.
Integration allowances vary by plan. See Pricing for what's included.
Not on the list, or need a specific workflow? Tell us what you use and what you'd like Frontly to handle. We'll check what's possible.
WHAT USUALLY DECIDES IT
The three questions that come up every time
A real person, whenever the caller wants one
Every workflow can hand the call to your practice manager or on-call dentist. The transfer carries a spoken briefing, so your team picks up already knowing who is calling and why. The caller never has to explain themselves twice, which is usually the moment a good call turns into a complaint.
More than one language, on the same number
Frontly answers in more than one language on the same practice number. For a clinic serving a community that does not speak English at home, that is the difference between a patient booking an appointment and hanging up.
A four-person Sydney physio and massage clinic runs Frontly in English and Mandarin today. They had been trying to hire a receptionist fluent in both, at a wage the clinic could justify. Instead of hiring, they went live with Frontly connected to their practice software.
Flat monthly rate, and knowledge that costs nothing to grow
Your plan is a flat monthly rate covering a set number of call minutes, and there is no cap on how many questions the AI is allowed to answer. Adding another topic to its knowledge never adds a line to the bill, and every rate we do meter is published up front. See pricing for the current rates.
ANSWERING SERVICE OR AI
Should a dental practice use an answering service or an AI receptionist?
An answering service takes a message and passes it on. An AI receptionist finishes the job on the call. For a practice the difference is whether the patient who rings at 8pm books a real appointment or leaves a number and waits. Frontly books, reschedules and fills the gap a cancellation just left.
Where a staffed answering service still wins
A trained operator reads a distressed caller faster than any software. Someone ringing in pain at midnight often needs reassurance before they need a booking, and a person hears that in the first sentence. It is the strongest argument for keeping a staffed service on your emergency line.
Where Frontly wins
Everything else is routine, and routine is where a message-taking service leaks money. New patient enquiries, reschedules, cancellation backfill and recall chasing all complete on the call, at any hour, without your front desk touching them the next morning.
Most businesses end up running one or the other rather than both. If you are weighing it up properly, the full cost and capability breakdown is in AI or human receptionist: which fits.
WHERE THE MONEY LEAKS
The calls a chairside team cannot take are the ones worth the most
A dental practice does not lose patients on the calls that reach the front desk. It loses them in the gap between the phone ringing and somebody being free to answer it, which for most practices is most of the day.
Bigger organisation?
Dental groups and multi-site clinics
Enterprise works with your group's own systems during the patient call and runs recall campaigns across every clinic, designed with your team. Own-cloud or on-premise deployment, SLA-backed uptime and a dedicated account manager.
FAQ
Frequently Asked Questions
You set your appointment types, durations and chair availability, and the AI checks live availability and books the patient on the call. With your practice management software connected (Dentally, Core Practice, Cliniko and the other systems listed on this page), the booking goes straight into your appointment book. Every booking also lands in your Frontly dashboard with the patient details and the full call transcript.
Yes. Frontly answers 24/7, so after-hours patients can book appointments, leave messages for specific practitioners, or get answers to common questions without your front desk staff being on call. Genuine dental emergencies are escalated to your on-call number straight away.
Yes. Every plan handles inbound cancellation and rescheduling requests, and on the Pro plan Frontly also makes outbound reminder calls before appointments, reducing no-shows without extra staff time.
Frontly uses natural, conversational voice AI, and you decide how it introduces itself. You can configure the greeting to introduce Frontly however you prefer, including as an AI assistant if that suits your practice.
Setup time depends on verification, workflow complexity and integrations. You start from a prebuilt receptionist workflow, so most of the setup is adding your appointment types, your cancellation and recall rules, and who a transfer should reach. You test the flow before it goes live. Practices with unusual booking rules need scoping first, and we will tell you upfront if yours is one of them.
Yes, on the Pro plan. Frontly's outbound campaign manager can call your 6-month and 12-month recall list automatically, books the next hygiene visit, and logs the outcome in your Frontly dashboard.
Frontly is a flat monthly rate with a monthly call-minute allowance, not a meter running from the first call. Every plan covers inbound answering, month to month, and the Pro plan adds outbound recall campaigns. Current rates are on our pricing page. A busy recall month is covered by the allowance rather than charged call by call.
Yes, with two kinds of connection. Systems marked Available on this page, such as Cliniko, connect with your permission, and we set them up with you during onboarding. Systems marked Requires vendor approval, such as Dentally and Core Practice, need the software company to approve the connection first, and we make that request with you. Nothing waits on it: every booking lands in your Frontly dashboard from the first call. Running something else? Tell us and we will check it.
In your practice management software, once it is connected, and always in your Frontly dashboard with the patient details, appointment type, requested time and the full call transcript. Email and SMS notifications can also push booking summaries straight to your reception inbox or phone, so your team sees overnight bookings first thing.
Yes. When a patient asks for a person, or a call matches a rule you set, Frontly warm-transfers it to the front desk or the practitioner you approve, with a short spoken briefing first. It can try the desk phone, then a backup mobile. If nobody can take it, Frontly takes a message and emails or texts it to your team at once.
Frontly answers from your practice information, such as fees, health funds, hours and parking, and it never guesses or gives clinical advice. A question outside that becomes a message for your team, or a transfer if you have set one up. You see the question and transcript in your dashboard, and you can add the answer yourself in the visual builder.
Yes. Each Frontly agent speaks the language you set, so you can run a dedicated Mandarin or Hindi line for patients, out of more than 40 languages. Patients book, reschedule or ask about a treatment without a language barrier. English callers hear a natural Australian voice you choose, and every call lands in your dashboard with a transcript.
AI receptionist that speaks Mandarin and HindiHear the Australian voices
Yes, when it is built around booking rather than message taking. The test is whether the system can complete an appointment on the call: check your schedule, offer real times, and write the booking back. You configure the prebuilt workflow with your appointment types, your hours and your triage rules, so a call that arrives mid-treatment can still end in a booked chair.
Filled chair time, not calls answered. Count new-patient appointments captured during treatment hours, cancellations refilled from the waitlist, and recall calls completed without an admin chasing them. Those three map straight onto production. We will model them against your own call volume and your own fee schedule before you commit to anything.
KEEP EXPLORING
Keep exploring Frontly for Dental
Go deeper on the capabilities, comparisons, and guides that matter most.
24/7 inbound answering
How Frontly answers every call, qualifies the caller, and books the job in your dashboard.
How inbound worksOutbound campaigns
Recalls, follow-ups, arrears, and lead reactivation dialled automatically at scale.
Run outboundAfter-hours answering
Patients ring about pain at 9pm. See how the overnight shift is triaged and who actually gets woken.
See after-hoursWhat an AI receptionist costs
Flat-rate, per-minute, per-call, and credit models compared, with the ROI maths.
Read the guideReady to Keep Every Chair Full?
Set up your AI dental front desk. No commitment beyond the plan you pick. Flat monthly rate.