AI assistant
Let the widget answer dental and practice questions, qualify leads, and connect booking-ready visitors to your online funnel.
By the end of this page your widget will answer visitors' questions — prices, opening hours, what an implant consultation involves — grounded in your own website and documents, and hand the conversation to your team whenever a human should take over.
What you need
AI answers are part of the AI assistant add-on: £99/month for GBP practices or $129/month for USD practices. The EUR catalogue has not been approved yet, so EUR practices cannot enable the add-on until SmileLine support confirms pricing. The add-on also unlocks reply suggestions and thread summaries in the Inbox. Enable it under Settings → Billing, then flip AI answers on in Settings → Chat widget.
How it answers
When a visitor types a free-text question, the assistant:
- retrieves the most relevant passages from your knowledge base and answers from them — it never invents prices or availability. If your knowledge doesn't cover the question, it says the team will confirm and asks for contact details instead;
- answers general dentistry questions at patient-education level and recommends a consultation for anything personal — it never diagnoses;
- collects the visitor's name and number naturally during the conversation and saves the lead exactly like the guided qualifier does;
- adds a Book an appointment button to its reply when the visitor asks to book and online booking is live with at least one bookable appointment type. The button opens the full booking funnel in a new tab; it does not preselect a visit type or collect booking details in chat;
- hands off to your team when the visitor asks for a person, mentions pain, or cannot use online booking — the thread flips to human mode and stays with your team. Pain and human requests always take priority over a booking button.
Everything it says is in the Inbox thread, marked as assistant messages. The visitor sees a typing indicator from the moment their message lands until the reply arrives; a reply can take some seconds when the assistant reads your knowledge base and checks online booking first.
The booking button is offered only in the reply to an explicit booking request; it is not a permanent shortcut in the widget. If online booking is paused, has no bookable appointment types, or becomes unavailable before the reply arrives, the assistant falls back to your team instead.
Build the knowledge base
The Knowledge base card on Settings → Chat widget feeds the assistant. Three source types:
- Website crawl — enter your practice site's address; SmileLine reads up to 150 pages on that site's apex/
wwwhost pair and refreshes them weekly. Re-crawl on demand after big site updates. Links that leave that pair or fail the public-destination safety policy are skipped. - Documents — upload PDFs, text, Markdown or HTML files (price lists, patient information leaflets), 10 MB each.
- Snippets — quick free-text facts: opening hours, parking, finance options. Snippets are the fastest way to teach it something.
Each source shows its ingestion status and how many passages it contributed. Removing a source takes its knowledge out of the assistant immediately. For document sources, the uploaded file is also queued for permanent deletion from storage.
Scanned PDFs with no selectable text can't be read — paste the content as a snippet instead.
Test before you switch it on
Click Test the assistant to chat against your current knowledge base without anything reaching your website or Inbox. Ask what a visitor would — "How much is whitening?", "Are you open Saturdays?" — and check the answers cite the sources you expect.
The assistant is suppressed the moment a team member replies in a thread — once a human joins, the AI stays out of that conversation.