Frequently asked questions.

We start with a 30-minute kickoff: you tell us your PMS, hours, providers, insurance specifics, and any quirky workflows. We configure your practice on the dashboard, customize voice and chat prompts, and connect to your phone system. Most single-location practices are answering live calls within 2–7 days.

For multi-location DSOs, we handle the rollout in waves: pilot 1–2 locations first, validate the workflow, then standardize across the rest of the group. The full rollout typically runs 4–8 weeks.

Median for single-location: 2–7 days. Fastest we've shipped: 48 hours when a practice lost their front desk lead and needed coverage immediately. Multi-location DSOs typically run 4–8 weeks for a full rollout, with the first location live in week 1.

The variable factors are PMS connection (Open Dental is fastest; Eaglesoft sometimes takes an extra day for credential setup), insurance configuration, and how much custom prompt tuning you want before going live.

Six things: PMS credentials (with API access enabled), business hours and provider list, current phone setup details, your top 10 appointment types and durations, insurance details (which payers you take, your provider NPIs), and a Google Calendar or Outlook connection if you want calendar sync. We send a checklist.

For practices that don't have all of this organized, we'll work through it with you. The information is the same stuff a new front-desk hire would need on day one.

Yes. We do live demo calls during the sales conversation — you call our demo number, talk to Aria as if you're a patient, and we walk through what's happening behind the scenes. We can also set up a sandbox for your specific PMS so you see Aria writing back to a test patient.

What we won't do is publish a recorded demo of a real patient call — that would be a HIPAA violation.

Day 1–2: kickoff, configuration, PMS connection, voice and chat prompts customized. Day 3–4: internal testing, you make test calls, we tune. Day 5–6: soft launch — Aria handles overflow during your busiest hours, your team monitors. Day 7+: full deployment if everything is working.

We stay in close communication during week 1. Any issue, we know about it within an hour.

No. Aria sits on top of your existing phone system — Twilio, RingCentral, Weave, anything that supports SIP forwarding. We don't replace your phone. We don't make you port your number. You can keep your current setup and Aria becomes the voice that picks up when the front desk doesn't (or all the time, if you choose).

Yes. We sign a BAA with every customer before any PHI touches the platform. PHI is encrypted at rest with AES-256-GCM and in transit with TLS 1.3. Patient phone-number lookups use SHA-256 hashing rather than decryptable indexes.

Full compliance posture is documented at /security including subprocessor list, retention policies, and incident response. Email security@ariadental.ai for the BAA template before signing.

Not yet. Honest answer: we're working toward it with a target completion of Q3 2026. We will not claim certification we don't have. Our subprocessors (AWS, GCP, Stripe, Twilio, OpenAI, Anthropic) hold their own SOC 2 attestations, and we operate SOC 2-aligned controls in advance of formal audit.

For enterprise DSO buyers whose security review requires SOC 2 today, we share our Type I report and audit roadmap, plus our subprocessors' attestations. Most security teams accept this as evidence of mature controls during the in-progress period.

Yes, with reasonable customer markups. We negotiate. What we won't do is strip the standard breach-notification clause, the audit-rights clause, or the subcontractor flow-down. Those clauses protect both your practice and our broader compliance posture.

United States only. Primary cloud in us-east-1 (AWS) and us-west-2 (GCP) for redundancy. We don't replicate PHI to non-US regions. EU residency isn't currently supported.

Backups are 30-day rolling, encrypted, geo-redundant within the US footprint.

Default is 90 days for call audio. Configurable up to 7 years per practice settings — dental records retention requirements vary by state, and we let you configure to your state's longest applicable requirement. Transcripts mirror audio retention by default.

On termination, we export all your data to CSV (patients, appointments, communications history) and deliver to you. We then destroy our copies within 60 days, except where extended retention is requested or required by law. The exit process is documented in our BAA — read it before signing.

No lock-in: your data is yours.

Three tiers: Solo, Growing, and DSO. Pricing scales with call volume and number of locations. Most single-location practices land in Solo or Growing. We publish ranges on /pricing and quote you a specific number within 24 hours of submitting your details.

Why ranges and not a fixed number on a page? Because plan fit depends on call volume — we don't want practices buying the wrong tier from a pricing page.

No. Default is monthly with no annual lock-in. Annual is available on Growing tier with a negotiated discount (usually 8–15%). DSO tier is typically annual.

We don't push annual on Solo because most early-stage practices benefit from the flexibility to adjust as they figure out the AI receptionist workflow.

We don't cut you off. You get notifications at 80% and 100% of quota. If you go over, we either bill the overage at a per-call rate (disclosed in your contract) or recommend bumping to the next tier. We'd rather have you on the right plan than ratchet up overage charges.

No setup fees on Solo or Growing. DSO contracts sometimes include a one-time professional services fee for complex multi-PMS rollouts; this is disclosed in the quote, never a surprise on invoice.

Live: Open Dental, Dentrix, Eaglesoft. Coming soon: Curve Dental. Planned: Carestream/SoftDent, Practice-Web. See /integrations for the full directory.

PMS depth varies — "integration" means full appointment write-back, patient creation, provider sync, and (for Open Dental and Dentrix) insurance details and treatment plan visibility. Ask for a demo of write-back into your specific PMS test environment before signing.

Yes. Aria sits on top of your existing phone system. We support SIP forwarding from Twilio, RingCentral, Weave Phone, and most major VoIP providers. No phone hardware replacement. No number porting required.

Yes. Both are live integrations. We support provider-aware sync — each provider can have their own connected calendar with custom availability windows. iCloud is also supported for solo practitioners.

The sync is bi-directional: bookings written by Aria appear in your calendar; events you add in your calendar block availability for Aria.

Stripe, Square, and CareCredit are live. Stripe is our primary integration — tokenized card-on-file, deposits, and post-visit payment links all run through Stripe. We don't store card numbers; everything is tokenized via Stripe Customer objects.

Most patients can tell within the first 1–2 sentences that the voice is AI — modern voice AI is good but not indistinguishable. What matters more: do they get their problem solved? Aria's job isn't to fool patients into thinking it's human; it's to answer their questions, book their appointment, and verify their insurance accurately.

We disclose that the patient is talking to an AI receptionist when asked directly. We don't volunteer it unprompted because it's not legally required and it disrupts the booking flow for patients who don't care. If a state regulation requires disclosure, we configure that for the practice.

Aria escalates. If a patient asks something Aria isn't confident about (a clinical question, a complex insurance edge case, a cancellation requiring a fee waiver decision), Aria says "let me get the front desk to call you back" and routes a callback request to your team with the full context.

We build in confidence thresholds. We'd rather Aria say "I'll have someone call you back" than make up an answer.

Three modes. Mode 1: cold transfer — Aria forwards the call to your front desk if your front desk is open. Mode 2: callback request — Aria captures the patient's question and creates a callback task with timing preference. Mode 3: 911-style emergency — if a patient mentions a true emergency, Aria gives appropriate crisis-line guidance and escalates immediately.

Yes. Spanish is fully supported across voice and chat — same prompts, same booking flow, same insurance verification. Aria detects the language the patient uses and matches. Other languages (Mandarin, Vietnamese, Tagalog) are available depending on the regional voice availability — ask if you need a specific language for your patient population.

Most migrations take 5–10 days. The pieces: phone forwarding switches over, Aria configuration mirrors your current vendor's setup (call flows, escalation rules, prompts), historical data import is offered if your current vendor allows export.

We do parallel running for 1–2 weeks during the cutover — your current vendor and Aria both online, calls split between them, you compare. Then we cut over fully when you're confident.

Depends on the vendor. Most modern AI receptionist platforms will export your call logs, transcripts, and bookings on request. Some will charge for it. Read your current contract before signing with us — we can usually advise on what to ask for.

Typical timeline: week 1 — Aria configured in parallel; week 2 — soft cutover with phone forwarding split 50/50; week 3 — full cutover; week 4 — old vendor phased out. For practices in a hurry, we've done full cutovers in 5 days. The constraint is usually phone porting (not the AI side).

Monthly contracts cancel at the end of the current billing period — no termination fee. Your data exports to CSV. We destroy our copies within 60 days. We'd rather have you on the right product for your practice than locked into a contract you regret.