AI assistant

The AI assistant is a window you can open on any page of Smileline. Ask it about your leads, patients, calls and settings, ask how something in Smileline works, or ask it to prepare a change for you to check and confirm.

Open the assistantCopy Anchor Link

Click AI at the foot of the left rail, under Team chat, in the browser or in the desktop app. With the sidebar expanded, it's the AI icon next to Team chat at the bottom.

• Drag the window by its header to move it, and drag its bottom-right corner to resize it. With a keyboard, press Tab to reach the move and Expand controls in its header (they appear when they have focus), then use the arrow keys; hold Shift for bigger steps. Press Enter on Expand to make the window large, and again to go back. It remembers where you left it.
• It stays open as you move between pages. An answer keeps going in the background, even if you close the tab, and is waiting when you come back.
• Click New chat to start again.

What it can seeCopy Anchor Link

The assistant reads your practice through your own access: it can see what you can see in Smileline, and nothing more. It knows the page you are on — the lead selected on Leads, a patient's page, the settings page, or the automations board — so you can ask about "this patient" or "this board".

It never sees clinical records, medical alerts or private notes, except when you plan treatment on a patient's chart (see Plan treatment from the chart). It cannot read keys, tokens or payment details.

Ask a questionCopy Anchor Link

Type your question and press Enter. For example:

• "Summarise the calls with this patient."
• "Which implant leads haven't been reached this week?"
• "What are our opening hours at the main site?"
• "How do booking reminders work?"

For questions about how Smileline works, it reads the Smileline help pages and tells you which page the answer came from.

Dictate a messageCopy Anchor Link

Rather than typing, you can speak your message. Dictation works in every country where the assistant does.

• Speak for as long as you need. A longer dictation is turned into text in parts while you talk, so the wait after Done stays short.
• Smileline doesn't record or keep what you say. Your voice stays in your browser until its text arrives (ElevenLabs turns it into text and keeps what it is sent under its own retention terms), and only the message you send is saved.
• If your words could not be turned into text, the recording stays in your browser: click Retry, or Discard to drop it. If Smileline can't be reached, it keeps trying on its own.
• If you close the window while dictating, your words are waiting in the message box when you open it again. If you leave or reload the page before they arrive, your browser asks you first.
• A message can be up to 4,000 characters. If a dictation runs longer, the box says how much to cut before you can send it.
• In the desktop app on a Mac, allow the microphone for Smileline Desk in System Settings → Privacy & Security → Microphone if you turned it off.

While it worksCopy Anchor Link

While the assistant answers, the window shows Working for and how long it has been going, with the step it is on — for example "Reading Jane Doe's record". Click Working for to see every step it has taken; once the answer is in, it reads Worked for and the steps stay one click away. Hover over a step to see exactly what it looked at.

• To stop an answer, click the round stop button in the message box.
• The message you send rises into the conversation, and the answer fades in as it arrives. If your system is set to reduce motion, nothing moves.
• If you send another message while it works, it waits its turn. Click Cancel under a waiting message to drop it.

Charts and dashboardsCopy Anchor Link

Ask for numbers and the assistant can answer with charts: "Show leads and bookings this month by source", "How did our answer rate change week by week?" It reads your practice's data with read-only queries and draws the results with the same charts as the Reports pages — number tiles, bars, donuts, funnels, cohort grids and tables — several of them together as a dashboard.

• Bookings are counted the way the Dashboard counts them: diary bookings plus bookings recorded by date on Leads, each credited to the person who made it, so "bookings per person this week" matches the Team leaderboard. Bookings imported or synced without a creator show as Unknown.
• Ask "where does that number come from?" and it tells you what it counted: it remembers the queries behind its earlier answers in the same chat.
• Click Open large on a dashboard to see it full size, with the charts side by side. Click Show data under a chart to see the numbers behind it.
• A dashboard shows the data as it was when the assistant answered (As of). Ask again for the latest.
• These queries never read patients' names, contact details, notes, message text or clinical records. To find out who is behind a number, ask about the patients themselves.
• Charts need access to Reports. Payment figures also need access to the ledger, and ad spend needs access to Ads.

Guided toursCopy Anchor Link

Ask how to do something — "How do I add a location?" — and the assistant can prepare a guided tour. Click Start tour and it highlights each control in Smileline in turn, with what to do there. Click Next and Back to move through it, or close it at any time.

• A tour can move between pages for you, including when you click a highlighted link. If a highlighted button opens a window, the tour waits until you close it, then carries on.
• A call stops the tour, and a tour won't start during a call, so it never covers your call or takes you off the page.
• If a step's page is one you can't open, or its control isn't showing, the tour says so and you can carry on.
• Tours start from Smileline in your browser, not from the desktop app.

When an answer points to a page of Smileline, such as a patient's record or a settings page, it shows a button with the page's name (for example Jane Doe or Templates). Click it to open the page; hover over it to see where it goes. Links to the help pages open in a new tab.

Changes you confirmCopy Anchor Link

The assistant never changes anything by itself. When you ask for a change, it shows a card with exactly what will change — each field, before and after — and a beta warning. Values read the way you know them: opening hours as a week with the changed days marked, a colour as a swatch, people, stages and locations by name, and a longer text with what was added and removed.

• Click Confirm to run it. It runs once, as you, with the same checks as if you had made the change yourself. The activity log records it as made by the AI on your behalf.
• Click Cancel to decline it.
• Sending a new message replaces any card you have not confirmed yet.
• If someone changed the same thing after the card was made, Confirm stops and the card says it changed since — ask the assistant again.

Today it can prepare these changes:

• A location's name, timezone, phone, email, address or opening hours.
• Practice settings: the timezone, texting hours, the call-back rhythm, the brand colour and the monthly revenue target.
• A patient's name, phone numbers, email, address, language, preferred contact method and time, lead source and location, and adding or removing a tag. Never medical alerts, notes, consent or date of birth.
• A lead's owner, practitioner, value or snooze, or a move to another open stage.
• A new task or call-back, or marking a task done.
• Automations: switching a follow-up or booking message on or off, its timing, and the text of SMS, email and WhatsApp templates. A WhatsApp change goes to Meta for review, and the approved version keeps sending until the new one is approved. A designed email keeps its design: the assistant changes only its subject.
• Whole follow-up automations and booking messages — see Build automations with AI.
• Website pages and whole websites, previewed in the page editor — see Websites below.
• A treatment plan drafted on a patient's chart — see Plan treatment from the chart below.

If a change could not be confirmed as applied, the card says so: check the page, then click Mark applied or Mark failed. It is never retried on its own.

WebsitesCopy Anchor Link

Practices in the UK and the US — on pay-as-you-go, or with the SEO & Ads add-on on the older price list — can ask the assistant to draft their Smileline websites:

• With a page open in the website editor, click AI on the left and ask for a change: "Make the top section darker", "Add questions and answers about implant costs". The assistant stays in that tab while you work. The editor shows the change on the page as a preview. Click Keep to put it into your draft, or Discard to drop it.
• In the editor's Notes tab, Ask the assistant to apply these notes puts your team's page notes in the message box, quoted, for you to send.
• Ask for a new page or a whole website: "A landing page for clear aligners in Leeds". It starts from a template, and confirming makes the page, or a new website, as a draft.
• Nothing goes live until you publish, as with your own edits.
• It works from your design and the text your practice wrote. It never sees testimonials, review text or anything a patient wrote.
• It never ticks a claim, never changes how a form is connected, uses only pictures from your image library, links only to your own pages or to https:// addresses, and refuses a change that would make text hard to read or that the ad policy check would block.
• If the page changed after the draft was made, Keep stops and says so: ask again.

Each request counts as a message, like any other. Its drafts are kept with the conversation and deleted with it.

Plan treatment from the chartCopy Anchor Link

At practices in the UK, the US, Italy and Ireland, anyone who can write treatment plans — owners, managers, dentists and hygienists — can describe a case in plain words. The assistant reads what you ask, and Smileline's planning rules build the plan from it: the visits, their order, the waits between them and the time in the chair. The fees come from the patient's price list.

The card shows:

• the number of visits, the time in the chair, the total fee and about how long the treatment takes;
• each visit with what happens at it, such as Prep + temporary · Veneer · 33–43 or Filling · 15 MO, and the fee charged there. Work done over several visits is charged at its last one, the fit;
• the wait before each visit and why, such as 12 weeks · implant healing. Waits come from the healing and lab times each step needs: asking for a longer one can make a wait longer, never shorter. To shorten one, change it on the saved plan;
• what it assumed, and warnings for you to weigh, such as a visit that numbs both sides of the lower jaw;
• who the plan is for. A dentist's plans are their own. Anyone else saves the plan for a dentist — the patient's dentist, unless you say otherwise ("make it for Dr Patel") — and it is recorded as that dentist's plan, with you as the one who saved it;
• Based on the chart at the time it read the chart.

Fees come from the patient's price list, as charting would price them: the assistant never sets a fee. If a treatment has no code or no fee, the card lists it and Confirm stays off: add it in Settings → Price lists (or Procedure codes), then ask the assistant to draft again. Work on an extra (supernumerary) tooth is listed on the card too, and Confirm stays off: plan that work by hand on the chart.

How the plan is builtCopy Anchor Link

The assistant picks the treatments, their codes and the teeth from your words and the chart, and notes what you ask about timing. Smileline's planning rules then set the rest, so the same request always gives the same plan:

• Order: what you ask to come first, such as urgent pain or a hygiene visit; then examinations, hygiene and gum treatment; then surgery; then fillings and root canals; then crowns, veneers, bridges, dentures and implant crowns. Whitening comes before front-tooth work matched to its shade, and aligners before definitive work.
• Grouping: the same kind of work goes in one visit, such as all the veneer preparations or all the extractions. Other work joins a visit when it is on the same side of the mouth or the upper jaw, and never adds the other side of the lower jaw.
• Waits: lab and healing times, such as 12 weeks for lower implants and 16 for upper ones. A review is booked a week after surgery, with nothing else before it, and a gum re-assessment 4 weeks after deep cleaning.
• Time in the chair: work done at one visit takes its code's Default duration (min) from Settings → Procedure codes, and each further tooth of the same work at that visit takes less. Work over several visits takes Smileline's own time for each step. Visits stay under 3 hours unless one piece of work needs longer.

Say how the patient wants it, in your own words. For example:

• "hygiene first", or "the root canal on 36 first, she's in pain";
• "as few visits as possible";
• "keep each visit under an hour";
• "the front teeth must be finished within 7 weeks, for her wedding";
• "fit the crown and the bridge together";
• "sedation for the surgery".

Some changes can't be asked for this way, such as merging two particular visits: make them on the saved plan.

Click View in 3D to play the draft as a 3D journey before you save it (see The plan in 3D). The same window's Explore tab has its own chat, which shows work on the patient's teeth in 3D and saves nothing (see Explore in 3D).

• To change the draft, ask in the chat — "do the hygiene first", "make it for Dr Patel" — and the assistant drafts it again. The earlier card can no longer be confirmed.
• If the teeth the plan works on change before you confirm, or a price or its tax changes since the draft, Confirm stops and says so: ask the assistant to draft again. So does a card drafted before Smileline updated its planner.
• The saved plan is an ordinary draft: change it, present it and book it like any other (see Drafted by the AI assistant).

A conversation that used a patient's chart stays clinical: if treatment planning stops being available at your practice, it can't carry on, so start a new chat.

Long answersCopy Anchor Link

A single answer can take up to eight steps. If it needs more, it stops and offers Continue. If it was interrupted, click Resume; if the AI's reply could not be read, click Retry or Dismiss. If one of your answers is already running, a new one waits its turn.

An answer stops if you sign out or switch to another practice. Come back and click Resume to carry on.

Messages and pricingCopy Anchor Link

On pay-as-you-go, the assistant has no message limit: an answer is billed as the AI calls it makes, each priced by the task from under 1p (1¢ in the US), on your monthly invoice.

On the older price list:

• Without the AI add-on, your practice gets 50 free messages each calendar month.
• With the AI add-on (£99 or $129 a month), your practice gets 2,000 messages each billing period, then each message is £0.06 or $0.07.

Each message you send counts once, however many steps it takes. Continue, Resume and Retry never count again.

PrivacyCopy Anchor Link

• Your conversations are private to you.
• They are deleted 30 days after their last message, and straight away when a patient they used is erased.
• A conversation in which the assistant ran a report closes when any patient of the practice is erased, because a report can include anyone. Start a new conversation to carry on.
• If your role changes, the assistant starts a new conversation.
• It is not available during a Smileline support visit.

Owners, managers, Agency members, front desk, telesales, dentists and hygienists can use the assistant.