Plaud, Otter.ai, Fireflies, and ChatGPT can record. None of them know dentistry.
You’ve probably tried at least one of them. Maybe you’re still using one. You prop your phone on the bracket tray, hit record, finish the exam, and then spend the next ten minutes — or ten that night — turning a wall of text into something that actually belongs in a chart.
That’s not a workflow. That’s transcription plus manual work, which is almost as slow as typing from scratch and adds HIPAA risk you probably haven’t thought through.
This page is for dentists doing that math right now: Is this actually saving me time, or am I just solving one problem by creating three others?
Short answer: general transcription tools are good at one thing — capturing words. They have no idea what to do with “occlusal caries on 19, explorer catches, patient symptomatic — going to prep today, go with a D2392” or “six-three, six-two, five-nine, six-one” (that’s a perio read, not a phone number). The tools don’t know. They can’t know. They were built for meetings, not operatories.
What Transcription Tools Actually Do
Transcription tools convert spoken audio to text. That’s their job and they do it reasonably well — for meetings, interviews, lectures.
A clinical dental visit is not a meeting. It’s a structured clinical encounter that produces documentation with specific requirements: CDT codes, tooth numbers, surface designations, perio pocket depths, treatment plan format, billing narratives. These aren’t formatting preferences — they’re what makes a note useful for charting, billing, and legal defensibility.
A transcription tool gives you a word dump. A dental AI scribe gives you a structured clinical note — one your team can review and enter directly into the PMS without guessing what the dentist meant.
The difference in practice:
| What Transcription Gives You | What OraCore Gives You |
|---|---|
| Raw audio → unformatted text | Ambient audio → structured clinical note |
| You figure out the CDT code | CDT code inferred from natural clinical language |
| Perio readings buried in transcript | Perio findings organized by tooth, by surface |
| You write the treatment plan | Treatment plan drafted and formatted |
| You write the insurance narrative | Insurance narrative auto-generated |
| Extra steps: record → clean → structure → enter | One step: visit happens → note ready for team review |
The Three Ways Transcription Tools Fail for Dental
1. Extra Steps = No Workflow
Every transcription tool on this list produces a starting point, not a finished note. You still have to clean the transcript, identify the relevant clinical information, assign CDT codes, format it for the chart, and enter it into your PMS. That’s three to five steps you didn’t have before — you just moved the work rather than removing it.
An ambient dental scribe eliminates those steps. The visit happens. The note is ready. Your team reviews it and enters it into the chart. That’s the fundamental difference between a voice recorder and a dental AI scribe — one captures audio, the other does the work.
2. Missing Clinical Context
Generic transcription tools have no dental vocabulary, no clinical logic, and no concept of what a note needs to contain. When you say “DO on 14” and follow it with pocket depths and a recare recommendation, the tool hears words. OraCore hears a two-surface posterior composite on tooth #14, maps it to D2392, flags the perio findings separately, and structures the recare note for your hygienist’s follow-up.
The gap isn’t minor. These tools were trained on meetings and interviews. Dental clinical language — CDT codes, tooth numbering systems, perio notation, specialty terminology — is a different domain entirely. No amount of prompting ChatGPT fixes this, because it’s not a prompt problem. It’s a domain training problem.
3. HIPAA BAA Exposure
This one matters more than most dentists realize.
Here’s where most workarounds fall short:
- Public ChatGPT: No BAA available. OpenAI has confirmed ChatGPT is not HIPAA compliant. Recording patient audio and feeding it to ChatGPT is a potential HIPAA violation. Full stop.
- Otter.ai: HIPAA compliance requires a specific paid plan tier plus explicit BAA configuration. The free and standard plans are not covered. Most dentists using Otter casually don’t have a BAA.
- Plaud Note: Routes audio through third-party AI. BAA language for dental clinical use is not clearly defined in standard plans.
- Fireflies.ai: No HIPAA BAA on standard plans. Business plan only, and it’s a meeting tool — not designed for PHI handling in a clinical context.
- Microsoft Copilot: HIPAA-capable only on Microsoft 365 E3/E5 enterprise plans with specific configuration. Not included in standard Microsoft 365 subscriptions most practices run.
OraCore provides a Business Associate Agreement at every tier — Light, Pro, and Enterprise. It’s not a configuration you have to hunt down. It’s included because clinical documentation is the entire product.
The Tools, One by One
Plaud Note
Plaud is a hardware recorder — a small device that clips to your iPhone or sits on a surface. It’s elegant, it’s quiet, and it’s attracted real interest from dentists who’ve seen the YouTube demos. Dentist communities on Reddit have been testing it.
The honest assessment: Plaud is a beautiful transcription device. One Reddit user in r/PlaudNoteUsers put it plainly: “PLAUD is not for medical use. I tried it with several patients. It’s very bad with context.” That’s not a fringe view — it’s the recurring feedback from dentists who’ve tried it in an actual operatory. It doesn’t understand dental context, it requires manual cleanup, and it doesn’t scale to a whole-team workflow.
Otter.ai
Otter is a well-known meeting transcription tool with a professional reputation. It recently added HIPAA compliance messaging, which has drawn some dental interest.
What Otter does well: accurate real-time transcription for business conversations. What it doesn’t do: produce a structured dental note. Like all transcription tools, the output requires manual reformatting before it belongs in a chart. And the HIPAA compliance story is more nuanced than the marketing suggests — specific plan tier required, BAA must be explicitly set up, and most dentists using the free or standard tier aren’t covered.
Fireflies.ai
Fireflies is a meeting recorder built for capturing action items, decisions, and next steps from team calls. Some practice managers who use it for internal meetings have tried repurposing it for patient visits.
It doesn’t translate. Meeting summaries and “action items” don’t map to clinical documentation. There’s no dental vocabulary, no CDT awareness, no note structure. The standard plan has no HIPAA BAA. This is a category mismatch — not a dental tool being used wrong, but a tool never intended for clinical use being pressed into service.
iPhone Voice Memos + ChatGPT
This is the most common DIY workaround and the most exposed one. Zero additional cost, tools already in hand, feels like it should work.
The reality: entering patient information into public ChatGPT is a potential HIPAA violation. OpenAI has no BAA for consumer ChatGPT. This isn’t a technicality — it’s the entire reason healthcare AI compliance exists. Beyond the compliance risk, the workflow is genuinely cumbersome: record the visit → transcribe → copy the transcript → paste into ChatGPT → prompt → review and edit the output → enter into the chart. That’s five or more steps where an ambient scribe is one. And ChatGPT’s output requires heavy editing because it doesn’t know dental.
Microsoft Copilot
Copilot has come up in dental circles as an alternative to Plaud, especially for practices that already pay for Microsoft 365. The rationale: it’s bundled, it’s familiar, it might work.
HIPAA compliance for Copilot requires a Microsoft 365 E3 or E5 enterprise plan with specific configuration — not included in the standard subscriptions most practices use. Beyond compliance, Copilot is a general-purpose LLM assistant with no ambient listening capability for real-time clinical documentation. You’d still be recording manually, cleaning up a transcript, and prompting for a note — same problem, different interface.
Full Comparison Matrix
| Feature | OraCore | Plaud Note | Otter.ai | Fireflies.ai | Voice Memos + ChatGPT | Microsoft Copilot |
|---|---|---|---|---|---|---|
| Dental-specific AI | ✅ Built for dental | ❌ General | ❌ Meetings | ❌ Meetings | ❌ General LLM | ❌ General LLM |
| HIPAA BAA included | ✅ All tiers | ⚠️ Unclear for dental | ⚠️ Paid plan + config | ⚠️ Business plan only | ❌ No BAA available | ⚠️ Enterprise only |
| CDT code support | ✅ Native | ❌ None | ❌ None | ❌ None | ❌ None | ❌ None |
| Perio charting support | ✅ Detection & analysis | ❌ None | ❌ None | ❌ None | ❌ None | ❌ None |
| Structured clinical notes | ✅ Direct from ambient audio | ❌ Transcript only | ❌ Transcript only | ❌ Meeting summary | ❌ Manual prompt needed | ❌ Manual prompt needed |
| Insurance narrative generation | ✅ Auto-generated | ❌ No | ❌ No | ❌ No | ❌ Manual | ❌ Manual |
| Whole-team coverage | ✅ Unlimited providers | ❌ One device | ❌ Per-seat | ❌ Per-seat | ❌ One user | ❌ Per-seat |
| PMS integration | ✅ Scribe Pro | ❌ No | ❌ No | ❌ No | ❌ No | ❌ No |
| Extra steps required | ✅ None — note ready for team | ❌ Transcript → manual cleanup | ❌ Transcript → manual cleanup | ❌ Summary → reformatting | ❌ 5+ steps | ❌ 5+ steps |
| Purpose-built for dental | ✅ Yes | ❌ No | ❌ No | ❌ No | ❌ No | ❌ No |
What OraCore Actually Does
OraCore listens during the appointment — not to your team’s side conversations, not to the suction and handpiece, but to the clinical encounter — and produces a structured clinical note your team can review and enter directly into the PMS.
What that means in practice:
- CDT codes inferred from natural clinical language — you say “DO on 19,” OraCore maps it to the right code. You don’t verbalize the code.
- Perio findings detected and organized — readings are structured, not buried in a transcript
- Treatment plan drafted from what was discussed — not reconstructed later
- Insurance narrative generated from the clinical encounter — front desk submits, doesn’t write
- Post-visit follow-up email drafted automatically — ready to send before the patient reaches the front desk
- HIPAA BAA included at every tier, no configuration required
This isn’t a transcript you clean up. It’s documentation your team actually uses.
OraCore starts at $149/month for unlimited providers — no per-seat fees. Every dentist, hygienist, and assistant in your practice, same price.
Stop cleaning up transcripts. Start finishing notes.
If you’ve been using a transcription workaround and wondering whether there’s a better option — there is. Schedule a demo and we’ll show you a live patient visit, start to finish, in your actual workflow.
Schedule a DemoSee Plans & PricingNo commitment. No enterprise contract. 14-day free trial available on every plan.
Frequently Asked Questions
You can get closer with careful prompting, but you’re still working around two problems: (1) ChatGPT isn’t HIPAA compliant for patient data — entering PHI into a public LLM exposes your practice legally, and (2) a general LLM still doesn’t have the clinical context to reliably infer CDT codes, perio findings, or chart-ready structure.
HIPAA compliance requires more than a checkbox. You need a signed Business Associate Agreement and must be on the correct plan tier with the right configuration. Most dentists using Otter casually haven’t completed this process. And even if you have — Otter still produces a transcript, not a structured clinical note.
If “fine” means you’re getting a transcript and then spending 10 minutes per patient turning it into a chart note, you’ve solved the recording problem but not the documentation problem. OraCore is worth evaluating if you want the note ready — not just the transcript.
You review every note before it goes in the chart. OraCore drafts — you approve. Think of it as a dental assistant who takes excellent notes and hands them to you for a quick check, not an autonomous system writing directly to the record.
Most practices are confident in the workflow within a week. There’s no special setup during appointments — OraCore listens in the background. The biggest adjustment is trusting that the note is ready when you are.
OraCore works with virtually every major PMS — Dentrix, Eaglesoft, Open Dental, Carestream, Curve Dental, and more. Scribe Pro reads patient context, appointment data, and demographics directly from your existing system.