AI Dental Scribes in 2026: Bola vs Kiroku vs the Voice Tools Built Into Overjet, Pearl, Videa, and Dentrix Ascend

A year ago, "AI dental scribe" meant picking a specialist vendor. Now your imaging AI company and your practice management system probably want the job too.

Between October 2025 and August 2026, three of the best-known dental imaging AI companies and Henry Schein One's cloud practice management system all shipped their own voice documentation. VideaHealth launched Voice Notes. Overjet bought a documentation startup and released Overjet Voice. Pearl announced Pearl Voice. Henry Schein One built voice notes and voice perio charting directly into Dentrix Ascend. The specialist vendors, Bola AI and Kiroku, are still here, and Bola already powers the voice features inside two other practice management systems.

So the question for a dental practice in late 2026 isn't really "which AI scribe?" It's "standalone, or bundled with a platform I already pay for?" This comparison covers what each option actually does, where the data ends up, what happens to the audio, and what the research says about voice perio charting accuracy. It closes with a pilot you can run in one hygiene column in two weeks.

"Dental scribe" is really three different jobs

Medical scribes mostly write narrative notes. Dental documentation is split into three tasks that work very differently, and vendors are not equally good at all of them.

• Voice perio charting. A hygienist calls out six-point probing depths, bleeding on probing, recession, mobility, and furcation, and the numbers fill in the perio chart. This is structured data. One misheard digit is a wrong clinical measurement sitting in a specific field. It is also the job that used to take two people.
• Restorative (hard-tissue) charting. Existing restorations, decay, missing teeth, and planned treatment go onto the odontogram. This is structured too, and it feeds treatment plans and claims.
• Clinical notes. The narrative record of the visit, either dictated after the exam or captured ambiently from the conversation. This is closest to what a medical AI scribe does, and it carries the same risks we covered in our look at scribe accuracy and hallucinations.

Ask any vendor which of the three it does, and how the output gets into your PMS. A tool that writes a great note but can only paste text can't fill in a perio chart for you.

The twelve months that changed the category

The timeline shows how quickly the bundled options appeared:

• October 10, 2024: Open Dental announces a native integration of Bola AI's voice perio and clinical documentation.
• March 26, 2025: Curve Dental launches "AI-Assisted Notations," powered by Bola AI, covering voice clinical notes, perio, and restorative charting.
• October 29, 2025: VideaHealth launches Voice Notes, which it calls the first ambient AI scribe built for dentistry.
• December 2, 2025: Overjet acquires DentalBee, an AI documentation company offering hands-free perio charting and automated clinical notes.
• January 28, 2026: Overjet announces general availability of Overjet Voice.
• April 1, 2026: Dentrix Ascend releases Voice Notes inside the Ascend chart, built with AWS.
• April 8, 2026: Pearl announces Pearl Voice, with ambient notes, voice perio charting, and more than 30 procedure-specific templates.
• April 30, 2026: Henry Schein One announces Dentrix Ascend's "Next Generation Clinical Workflow," which folds Voice Notes, Voice Perio, and its Detect AI imaging into one chairside flow.
• August 20, 2026: Overjet adds hands-free hard-tissue charting and "natural" voice perio charting to Overjet Voice.

The pattern mirrors medicine, where Epic's built-in AI charting put pressure on standalone scribes. We covered that in Epic AI charting vs. standalone scribes. Dentistry is getting there faster because the imaging AI vendors already have software running in the operatory.

The standalone specialists

Bola AI

Bola AI started with voice perio charting and has the broadest documentation feature set of the independent vendors. It is listed in our directory as two entries, Bola AI for charting and Bola AI Scribe Assistant for notes.

What it does:

• Voice Perio captures pocket depths, bleeding on probing, recession, mobility, furcation, and suppuration, writing them directly into the PMS perio chart.
• Voice Restorative covers conditions, procedures, history, and treatment planning. Bola claims it takes under two minutes.
• Clinical Notes is dictation with a wake word ("Hey, Bola" to start, "Stop Bola" to end). Bola says it now works with any desktop-based PMS, not only those with Bola integrations.
• AI Scribe listens ambiently and writes structured SOAP notes. Bola says it also suggests CDT codes based on the documented procedures.

Where the data lands: Bola lists native integrations with Dentrix, Dentrix Ascend, Eaglesoft, Open Dental, Curve Dental, and Fuse. Patterson Dental sells Bola as an Eaglesoft add-on, and it powers the built-in voice features in Open Dental and Curve.

Hardware: Bola publishes a recommended microphone list. For perio and restorative charting it suggests wireless headsets such as the Poly Voyager 4310 UC or a clip-on lavalier like the Hollyland Lark M2. For ambient notes it suggests a conference-style mic such as the EMEET Luna or Philips SmartMike Duo.

Vendor claims: 10,000+ dentists and hygienists, 3 million+ completed charts, and a "99% accuracy rate." These numbers come from Bola and have not been independently published. Pricing is quote-based, and Bola offers a downloadable patient consent form.

Best fit: practices on Dentrix, Eaglesoft, Open Dental, or Curve that want voice perio charting writing into the real perio chart, with no link to an imaging AI contract.

Kiroku

Kiroku comes at the problem from the note side. It was founded in 2017 by a dentist and a machine-learning engineer and is registered in London. Its core product is clickable note templates that make notes consistent across a team, plus Co-Pilot, which listens to the appointment and fills in your template.

What makes it different:

• Audio is not kept. Kiroku's compliance page says: "Audio recordings made during your consultation are never stored - only transcribed, and then the recording is removed." That is the opposite of Overjet's approach (below), and both are reasonable positions.
• It is a notes tool. We found no voice perio charting feature that writes into a US PMS perio chart. If perio charting is your main pain point, Kiroku doesn't address it.
• Integration is mostly copy-and-paste. Kiroku's help center says notes can go into "any field that accepts text input." It lists Dentrix, Dentrix Ascend, Eaglesoft, Open Dental, Curve, CareStack, Fuse, and a dozen others, but those use a "Copy Notes" button. A Chrome extension puts Kiroku alongside cloud-based PMSs in the same tab.
• The regulatory profile is mostly UK. Kiroku lists UK registration as a Class I medical device, NHS DTAC and DCB0129 compliance, and GDPR compliance. It also states HIPAA compliance. Its compliance page does not mention a Business Associate Agreement, so get a signed BAA before any US patient data goes in (see what HIPAA compliance means for AI tools).

Pricing: Kiroku's public pricing page lists per-clinician plans in pounds and Australian dollars, with a 14-day free trial. Third-party software directories list a US "Essential" tier at about $48 a month. Confirm US pricing with Kiroku directly.

Best fit: dentists whose problem is inconsistent or slow notes rather than perio charting, practices that want the same template standard across associates, and anyone uncomfortable with a vendor keeping visit audio.

The bundled options

None of these three imaging vendors publishes pricing for its voice product.

Overjet Voice

Overjet is already in many practices for FDA-cleared radiograph analysis (see our dental AI guide). Overjet Voice came out of its DentalBee acquisition and now covers ambient clinical notes, hands-free perio charting, hard-tissue charting, referral letter drafts, and "clinical conversation analysis" for performance insights. It supports English and Spanish.

Three details matter for a buying decision:

• Audio retention. Overjet's launch announcement says Voice "offers secure, 7-year encrypted audio storage and time-stamped transcripts, providing forensic-level protection against malpractice and board audits." That's a real benefit in a dispute. It also means seven years of recorded conversations exist and could be requested in litigation. Decide whether you want that on purpose, not by default. Our consent and recording guide explains why a scribe is legally a recording device.
• Write-back. According to DrBicuspid's August 2026 report, hard-tissue charting is available on CareStack, Eaglesoft, Open Dental, Dentrix Core, Dentrix Ascend, and Denticon at no extra cost to existing Voice subscribers. The "natural" perio charting lets clinicians say measurements in their own words and order. Overjet claims more than 98% accuracy on natural phrasing.
• The payer side. Overjet describes itself as a platform for providers and payers. Its website markets AI solutions to dental insurers, including utilization review. That doesn't make its provider tools worse. But if your documentation, radiograph analysis, and your insurer's claim review all run on one company's AI, you should know that when a claim is denied.

Pearl Voice

Pearl, best known for its Second Opinion radiograph AI, announced Pearl Voice on April 8, 2026. It covers ambient transcription, AI-generated SOAP notes, voice perio charting with hands-free commands, 30+ procedure templates (exams, fillings, crowns, scaling and root planing, root canals, extractions), and recording that keeps running while you move between screens. Pearl says notes write "directly into supported practice management systems" but the announcement doesn't name them. Ask for the list.

Pearl has also moved toward insurance paperwork. Its Second Opinion 3D launch on September 3, 2026 added automatic conversion of CBCT findings into "insurance claim-ready documentation." Expect the imaging, notes, and claims pieces to become more tightly linked.

VideaHealth Voice Notes

VideaHealth (not currently listed in our directory) launched Voice Notes in October 2025. It has two modes: Smart Ambient Mode for multi-speaker conversations and Quick Dictation Mode for free-form dictation. It organizes findings into complaint, findings, assessment, and treatment plan. It also has click-to-activate consent and recording controls, so the clinician explicitly starts listening instead of the system always being on. VideaHealth's figures ("95 percent complete clinical notes on the first pass," "more than ten hours per provider each week") are vendor claims.

Dentrix Ascend (built into the PMS)

If you're on Dentrix Ascend, voice documentation is now part of the software. Henry Schein One's help and product pages describe:

• Voice Notes (post-exam dictation) is included with the Ascend Essentials and Pro packages. The standard version limits a dictation to five minutes.
• Voice Notes Ambient (unlimited, capturing the conversation as it happens) is included only with the Ascend Accelerate package.
• Voice Perio captures perio measurements hands-free, and notes save straight into the patient record as complete or incomplete drafts.

Two caveats. This is Dentrix Ascend only, not Dentrix desktop. And the recommended hardware (a wearable wireless mic or a desktop conference speaker, naming Hollyland and EMEET models) is essentially the same kit Bola recommends. The engine is new, but the microphone problem hasn't changed.

What the research says about voice perio accuracy

Every vendor on this list claims 95–99% accuracy, and none has published a peer-reviewed validation of its commercial product that we could find. The independent research is small and early, but it's useful because it shows where voice charting fails:

• Journal of Dental Sciences, January 2026 (Lo et al., doi:10.1016/j.jds.2025.10.034). Researchers in Taiwan built a two-stage system using OpenAI's GPT-4o-transcribe and GPT-4.1-mini, then tested it on 15 recordings across five clinical scenarios using the mixed-language speech common in Taiwanese clinics. Overall accuracy was 67.40%. Furcation, mobility, and missing-tooth fields were above 90%, and bleeding on probing was 85.76%. But probing depth was 53.33% and gingival recession 52.01%. The main causes were uneven speech speed, drawn-out pronunciation creating repeated numbers, and single position errors that cascaded into chain errors.
• Healthcare Informatics Research, April 2026 (Kim et al., doi:10.4258/hir.2026.32.2.118). A Korean feasibility study tested two speech-to-text engines on bilingual perio probing in a working clinic (mean noise 60.65 dB). Three-digit number recognition was 88.3% and 96.8%, but complete-phrase matching was only 36.7% and 52.5%. A pin-type clip-on microphone gave stable recognition, and the authors concluded that "further optimization is required before routine clinical application."

Neither study tested Bola, Overjet, Pearl, Videa, or Dentrix. Purpose-built commercial systems trained on dental speech should do better than a general-purpose research prototype. The lessons still apply:

1. Numbers are the hard part. Probing depths and recession, the core of a perio chart, were the weakest fields in the Taiwan study.
2. Errors cascade. One tooth or site shifted by a position can mislabel every reading after it. A tired read-back won't catch that.
3. The microphone matters as much as the model. Budget for real headsets or lavaliers in every hygiene operatory.
4. Accents and bilingual speech are a real variable. If your hygienists switch languages, test with them specifically. Overjet advertises English and Spanish; ask the others what they support.

Standalone or bundled: the questions that decide it

1. Where does each data type land? Perio values should write to perio chart fields, restorative findings to the odontogram, and notes to the note. A text blob pasted into a note field is fine for narrative but useless for perio. Ask for a live demo on your PMS version, not a slide.

2. What happens to the audio? Overjet keeps it encrypted for seven years. Kiroku deletes it after transcription. Everyone else: ask. A retention period is a policy decision for your practice, with trade-offs for defending a claim versus what can be discovered in a lawsuit.

3. How does patient notice work? State law is moving specifically on AI documentation. Rhode Island's 2026 law requires healthcare providers, explicitly including dentists, to notify patients when AI is used to document visits and to review the AI-generated documentation for accuracy. Louisiana's Act 649 requires a health care professional to verbally disclose AI transcription before recording starts. Our 2026 state AI law roundup and state AI disclosure guide have the details. Overjet's own guidance notes that "consent requirements vary by state." Voice perio dictation that records only the clinician is lower risk than ambient capture of the whole conversation.

4. Who is suggesting the codes? Bola's AI Scribe suggests CDT codes, and Pearl is turning imaging findings into claim-ready documentation. That can reduce missed charges. It is also how medicine drifted into the coding-intensity problems we covered in AI scribes and billing audits. The dentist who signs the note owns the code, whoever suggested it.

5. How locked in do you want to be? Bundled voice is convenient and may be cheap or "included." But it ties your documentation workflow to your imaging AI or PMS contract. Switching radiograph vendors later could mean retraining your whole clinical team on a new voice system. A standalone scribe keeps those decisions separate.

6. Is there a BAA, and does it cover the AI subprocessors? Every vendor here states HIPAA compliance. Get the signed BAA anyway, and ask which cloud and AI model providers process your audio.

A two-week pilot for one hygiene column

Don't decide from demos. Our AI scribe rollout guide covers the full process. For dental voice charting, this is the short version:

• Days 1–2: set up properly. Proper microphone for each pilot operatory, PMS integration confirmed on your actual version, BAA signed, patient notice script written.
• Days 3–7: double-record perio. For 10–15 perio exams, have an assistant chart manually as usual while the hygienist uses voice. Compare site by site and count every mismatched value, especially probing depths and recession. Note any errors where one wrong position shifted later readings.
• Days 3–10: test the bad conditions. The noisiest operatory, back-to-back patients, the hygienist with the strongest accent or who switches languages, the last appointment of the day.
• Days 8–14: audit the notes and codes. Pull 20 AI-assisted notes and compare them with what happened in the visit and what was billed. Look for findings that weren't discussed, missing informed-consent documentation, and suggested codes the documentation doesn't support.
• Day 14: count time honestly. Include correction time. A voice perio chart that needs five fixes may not beat an assistant.

If you're evaluating a bundled tool, pilot a standalone one alongside it. The comparison is the only way to know whether "included" is actually good enough.

Quick picks

• Voice perio charting is the main pain, you're on Dentrix, Eaglesoft, Open Dental, or Curve, and you want to stay independent of your imaging vendor: Bola AI. Open Dental and Curve users may already have it built in.
• Notes are the main pain, you want template consistency, and you prefer audio not to be kept: Kiroku. Get a BAA and US pricing in writing.
• You already use Overjet imaging and want notes, perio, and hard-tissue charting from one vendor, and Spanish support matters: Overjet Voice. Decide deliberately about the seven-year audio retention.
• You already use Pearl Second Opinion: ask for Pearl Voice's supported PMS list and pilot it against a standalone option.
• You're on Dentrix Ascend: start with the Voice Notes and Voice Perio you may already be paying for. Check whether ambient capture needs the Accelerate package before buying anything else.

To compare dental documentation tools side by side, see AI dental scribes for solo dental practices and AI dental scribes for dental hygienists. You can also browse the AI dental scribe category, imaging and diagnostics tools, and our pages for solo dental practices and dental hygienists.

The bottom line

Dental voice documentation became a feature almost overnight. Imaging AI companies and PMS vendors now bundle it because documentation is the daily habit that keeps practices using their platforms. That's good news for prices, and practices on Dentrix Ascend, Open Dental, or Curve may already have a capable tool. But bundled doesn't mean validated. No vendor has published peer-reviewed accuracy data for its perio charting, the independent research shows probing depths are exactly where voice systems struggle, and audio retention and code suggestion vary widely between products. Pick the job you most need done, pilot it against your own manual charts, and make the audio and consent decisions yourself.

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This article is informational only and is not legal, clinical, billing, or procurement advice. Product features, integrations, packaging, and pricing change frequently. Accuracy, time-savings, and revenue figures cited from vendors are vendor-reported and were not independently verified. State notice and recording requirements vary and apply by patient location. Confirm current capabilities, BAA terms, and data retention directly with each vendor, and consult qualified counsel about your state's requirements before deploying any AI documentation tool.