Dental dictation software for exam, restorative, endo and oral surgery notes

Dental clinical notes are short but dense: tooth number, surfaces, anesthetic and dose, material, and what the patient was told. Gloves make typing between steps awkward, so many notes get written at the end of the day from memory. Saying the note right after the procedure is faster. General dictation tools were not built for "pulpitis", "obturation" or "pericoronitis". The Healthcare dictionary in VoicePrivate has 1,451 dental terms, with ENT and general medical terms alongside.

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Notes dentists and hygienists dictate

Comprehensive and periodic exams

Chief complaint, medical history updates, soft tissue findings, caries and existing restorations by tooth and surface, radiograph findings such as a periapical radiolucency, and the treatment plan.

Restorative procedure notes

Tooth number and surfaces, anesthetic such as articaine or lidocaine, isolation, material such as composite or amalgam, and the occlusion check.

Endodontic notes

Pulpal and periapical diagnosis such as irreversible pulpitis, access, working lengths, obturation with gutta percha, and post-op instructions.

Periodontal and hygiene notes

Scaling and root planing by quadrant, gingivitis or periodontitis findings, and home care instructions. Probing depths still go into your perio chart.

Oral surgery and implants

Extractions, bone grafting, implant placement and abutment notes, and follow ups for pericoronitis or a dry socket.

Procedure codes are a separate step. The American Dental Association maintains the CDT Code, which it describes as assuring consistency in documenting dental treatment. VoicePrivate does not pick or enter codes: you select the CDT code in your practice software, and VoicePrivate writes the narrative note.

Dental words general dictation gets wrong

The Healthcare dictionary stores the mishearings it corrects. A few from the dental list:

• "periodonitis" to periodontitis
• "pulpitus" to pulpitis
• "apicoectomee" to apicoectomy and "pulpotomee" to pulpotomy
• "pericoronitus" to pericoronitis
• "alveolar osteitus" to alveolar osteitis
• "radiolucient" to radiolucent
• "cefalometric radiograph" to cephalometric radiograph

What choosing Dental / Oral Health does

On Mac, open Settings and set the Medical specialty to Dental / Oral Health. Recognition is then primed with its core terms: caries, periapical, periodontitis, gingivitis, pulpitis, endodontic, root canal, gutta percha, obturation, pulpotomy, apicoectomy, articaine, lidocaine, crown, bridge, implant, abutment, pontic, composite, amalgam, occlusal, mesial, distal, buccal, lingual, molar, premolar, scaling, root planing and bruxism. A long misheard word that is a near miss of one of those terms is matched to it first. On Windows there is no picker and the full medical dictionary is used for every note.

Example: a composite restoration

Click into each field of the note, press the hotkey, speak, and press the hotkey again. The text is pasted when you stop.

1. Procedure. Press Command+Shift+Space and say: "Tooth number 30, mesial, occlusal and distal composite. Patient consented. Local anesthesia with articaine 4 percent with epinephrine 1 to 100,000, one carpule by inferior alveolar nerve block." Press the hotkey again.
2. Findings: press Command+Shift+Space and say: "Removed the existing amalgam and recurrent caries on the distal, about 2 millimeters from the pulp. No pulp exposure." Press the hotkey again.
3. Restoration: press Command+Shift+Space and say: "Rubber dam isolation, selective etch, bonding agent, composite placed in 3 increments, each light cured for 20 seconds. Occlusal contacts checked and adjusted." Press the hotkey again.
4. Next visit: press Command+Shift+Space and say: "Patient tolerated the procedure well. Discussed short term cold sensitivity. Next visit in 2 weeks: scaling and root planing, upper right and lower right quadrants." Press the hotkey again.

Into your practice software

VoicePrivate pastes through the clipboard and then puts back what you had copied, so there is nothing to install inside your practice software. It works in any text field that accepts a paste, including the clinical note fields of dental practice management systems. Tooth charts, perio charts and treatment plan grids are still clicked by hand. If your software runs in a remote desktop, the session must allow clipboard redirection from your computer.

Many dental notes repeat the same sentences, such as post-op instructions after an extraction or a consent statement. Text shortcuts expand a short phrase into that full paragraph, which you then edit for the patient in the chair.

On-device facts

Speech is processed on the Mac or Windows PC that runs VoicePrivate. Audio never leaves that computer, and nothing is sent to a cloud service for transcription. There is no recording of the appointment: you dictate the note yourself after or between patients. With Auto-save transcriptions on, which is the default, each dictation is also kept in the app's Library on that computer. Turn it off in Settings if you want the record system to hold the only copy.

Price

Healthcare Edition is $297 a year or $34.99 a month per clinician. There is no free trial. Individual monthly and annual plans have a 30-day money-back guarantee on the first payment. Practices of 2 to 20 clinicians can buy team seats.

Dental dictation FAQ

Oral and maxillofacial surgeons who write hospital operative reports can also read surgery dictation. For how on-device dictation compares with an AI scribe, see the private AI medical scribe guide.