Dental dictation: clinical notes and letters, with the right terms

A clinical note is only useful if every term in it is right. General-purpose voice dictation recognises everyday conversation very well, but it stumbles over the very stuff of dentistry: procedures, materials, periodontal conditions, eponyms, device references. TechVoice was designed for this problem: writing a profession’s vocabulary the way the practitioner writes it, and remembering their corrections. It works in French and in English.

Why general-purpose dictation struggles with dental vocabulary

At every moment, a speech recognition model picks the most likely words, based on everything it heard during training. “Peri-implantitis”, “root planing” or “post and core” are rare in that material, so when the sound is ambiguous, an everyday word wins. A note in which this happens has to be fixed by hand, term after term, and it is that correction time that makes people give up on dictation.

Tooth numbers (16, 36, 47…) are dictated as numbers. Review them like everything else: a wrong tooth does not stand out the way a misspelt term does.

How TechVoice learns your vocabulary

On top of speech recognition, TechVoice adds a correction step that knows your terms, fed by three sources:

1. Your specialty. Entered when you sign up, it is used to look up its terms in the scientific literature of the HAL open archive, in the language you dictate in.
2. Your sample documents. Upload a few notes, letters or treatment plans (PDF, Word): TechVoice extracts the terms, then forgets the text.
3. Your corrections. Every word you fix becomes a “misheard → correct” pair, applied to your next dictations.

What we have measured, and its limits: on our French corpus of orthopaedic reports, the text displayed during dictation gets about 25% of specialist terms wrong; after correction with the practitioner’s vocabulary, about 5%. These figures come from synthetic voices and are optimistic. Our other trials cover ten medical specialties (cardiology, neurology, ophthalmology…), also in French; none covers dentistry yet, and we do not present these figures as valid for it, nor for English. The details are in our article on how AI voice dictation works.

Notes that stay true to what you dictate

TechVoice’s correction only touches misheard words: it adds nothing, removes nothing and rewords nothing. An automatic check compares the corrected text with the recognised text, word by word and in order; if too much has changed, the raw transcript is kept. “No mobility” is not “mobility”: one misplaced negation is enough to change a note.

Every correction stays visible: one click shows what was changed. You always review a text before using it, and you remain its author.

Documents you can dictate

• Clinical notes, dictated straight after the appointment: endodontics, restorations, prosthodontics, with the teeth treated and the materials used.
• Surgical notes: extractions, implant placement, bone grafts or sinus lifts.
• Referral letters to an orthodontist, a periodontist, a maxillofacial surgeon or a GP: one-click formatting turns your dictation into a letter or an email, ready for you to review.
• Treatment plan notes, dictated while the examination is fresh, before you prepare the estimate in your practice software.
• Periodontal and implant follow-ups, filed in folders and easy to find again with search.

You can also upload a voice memo recorded elsewhere: TechVoice transcribes and corrects it in the same way, up to 60 minutes long.

What about health data?

TechVoice does not hold HDS certification, France’s certification for hosting health data. So do not dictate anything that could identify a patient: no name, no date of birth, no record number. The simplest way to work: dictate the clinical content in TechVoice, then add the patient’s identity in your practice management software.

Your voice and your texts are transcribed and corrected by Mistral AI and hosted by Scaleway, in France. Audio is not kept after transcription. Full details are on our Privacy page (in French).

Try it on your own notes

With no measurement on dental vocabulary yet, the only judgement that counts is yours, on a week of real documents: you get free points when you sign up, with no credit card required. For medical dictation in general, see our dedicated page; to estimate how much time you could save, our time-savings calculation, document by document.