AI language tools could revolutionize dental record keeping

A new study in the UK has found that automatic speech recognition (ASR) tools powered by artificial intelligence (AI) could significantly improve how dentists collect patient information – saving time and reducing administrative burdens.

Although the transcription accuracy of these tools is high, they can struggle with more technical language, and their reliability is currently not sufficient to support unverified use.

The results of a team from King’s College London are published in Journal of Dental Research. The researchers tested ten different ASR systems to see how well they could translate spoken orthodontic clinical notes into written text.

The best-performing system was an experimental pipeline that combined OpenAI’s GPT-4o transcription with a large language model for error correction, closely followed by the Heidi Health Digital Scribe and the speech-to-text application programming GPT4oTranscribe…