An AI receptionist that books, confirms and follows up on every patient
A closed-loop patient system: an AI voice agent answers the clinic line in three languages, captures the appointment, and hands it to a WhatsApp flow that gets the doctor’s approval, confirms the patient, collects a review and sends follow-up reminders.
Client: Akshaya Dental Clinic · India · Status: live
The challenge
A dental clinic loses revenue in the gaps between a patient calling and actually turning up. Calls go unanswered outside clinic hours, appointment requests are written on paper, confirmations depend on someone remembering to ring back, and nobody chases the follow-up visit. Each gap is a patient who quietly does not return.
What we built
We built the phone system and the messaging system as one loop. Inbound calls are answered by an AI receptionist running on self-hosted Asterisk telephony, which speaks English, Hindi and Telugu and captures the appointment details in conversation. After hangup, an extraction pass turns the transcript into structured fields, which are handed to a WhatsApp state machine on our own Tech Provider platform: the patient gets an immediate holding message, the doctor gets an Accept or Decline they can tap, and every downstream step — confirmation, rescheduling, review request, follow-up reminder — happens automatically from there.
Engineering highlights
- Self-hosted Asterisk and PJSIP rather than a resold SaaS dialer, with a separate SIP endpoint rendered per DID so outbound calls always present the correct caller ID.
- Indic text is generated in native script, never Latin transliteration, because transliterated Telugu and Hindi are badly mispronounced by text-to-speech.
- Digit sequences are written spaced apart so phone numbers and reference numbers are read one digit at a time instead of as lakhs and crores.
- Drop recovery: if the line fails mid-intake and the extracted fields have holes, the system rings the patient back and resumes the same conversation, carrying forward the answers it already holds instead of restarting the script.
- An auto-booking sweep honours the promise made to the patient — if the doctor has not responded within the review window, the appointment is booked exactly as requested and the doctor is told it happened.
- Several appointments can be in flight at once without confusion: doctor replies are matched by WhatsApp reply-context from a button tap or a quoted message, never guessed.
- The doctor proposes new slots in plain language — “tomorrow 4 pm”, “17/09/2026 3:00 PM” — and the system resolves them in clinic-local time.
- Post-visit the loop continues: the doctor confirms the consultation happened, the patient is asked for a review, and follow-up visit dates become reminders sent on the day.
Technology
Services used
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