ChatDent

an AI bot that helps you understand dental pricing — from simple lookups to cost breakdowns

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ChatDent

An AI bot that helps you understand dental pricing — from simple lookups to cost breakdowns.

🧠 Inspiration

I wanted to make something practical that shows how AI can actually help in real-world decisions — like understanding what dental procedures really cost.
Dental pricing is confusing, even for simple things like a cleaning, so I built a bot that can explain it clearly and even compare procedures.

💬 What it does

ChatDent is an AI agent that knows about the cost of dental procedures for a specific provider*.
It can handle different levels of question complexity:

Simple:

  • “How much is a dental cleaning?”
  • “Show all cleaning procedures.”

Moderate (light reasoning):

  • “Why is deep cleaning more expensive than regular cleaning?”
  • “Is there a cheaper alternative to D2750?”
  • “What’s the total for exam + cleaning + X-rays?”

High (domain reasoning):

  • “Why are implants so expensive?”
  • “What’s included in a root canal cost?”

The bot also ignores unrelated or unsafe inputs (e.g. jailbreak attempts, harassment, or random math).

*Uses my personal Principal Dental Discount Plan for prices.

🛠️ How we built it

Front-end:

  • Made with ChatKit React (by OpenAI).
  • Started locally, then deployed on Cloudflare Pages.

Back-end:

  • Agent flow: Built using Agent Kit (by OpenAI), hosted on their infrastructure with keys secured behind a Cloudflare Worker.
  • Data: Dental procedures, descriptions, and prices live in OpenAI Vector Storage as a RAG (Retrieval-Augmented Generation) dataset.
    • Source file: .md format
    • Chunk size: 100 tokens with 10-token overlap

⚙️ Challenges we ran into

  • Getting the vector store to return just enough context without overloading the answer.
  • Balancing between structured output (widgets) and natural language explanations.
  • Making guardrails strict enough to filter junk, but not block normal questions.

🏆 Accomplishments that we're proud of

  • The whole flow works end-to-end — chat UI, agent, data retrieval, and safety checks.
  • It can answer real dental pricing questions naturally and stay on topic.
  • Clean integration between OpenAI Agent Kit and Cloudflare setup.

📚 What we learned

  • How to design prompt flows that balance reasoning with retrieval.
  • How to chunk and embed Markdown-based data effectively.
  • That small UX details (like badges and widgets) make a big difference in clarity.

🚀 What's next for ChatDent

  • Add more provider data for broader comparisons.
  • Let users upload their own dental fee schedules.
  • Maybe integrate plan coverage estimates or “what’s worth it” comparisons.

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