Updated 2026-09-03 · 4 min read
Before you compare assistants it helps to understand something almost no provider explains on their website: there are two different ways to connect a program to a practice's WhatsApp, and they are not the same for your team or for your patients. One is the official WhatsApp Business API, from Meta. The other is the practice's own WhatsApp session, linked the way you open WhatsApp Web on a screen.
Almost everything that later seems odd about an assistant — that it can't message a patient who hasn't replied in a month, that you're asked for a new number, that reminders go out looking like forms — comes down to which of the two the provider chose.
What you already have: WhatsApp Business, the app
Most practices use WhatsApp Business, Meta's free app for businesses: the usual WhatsApp with a business profile, quick replies and an away message. It runs on the reception phone and on WhatsApp Web, and the number belongs to the practice.
That app has no intelligence: it sends the same automatic message to everybody and has no idea which slots each dentist has free. For somebody — or something — to actually reply on the practice's behalf, you need to connect a program. And that's where the two routes appear.
Route 1: the official WhatsApp Business API (Meta)
This is the channel Meta offers to companies and platforms. The number becomes managed by an authorised provider and messages go in and out through their platform, not through the app on the phone. It's the route big brands use, and so do many assistants sold to practices.
It brings the 24-hour window with it: you can only message a person freely during the 24 hours after their last message. Outside that, only templates approved by Meta, with fixed wording. A reminder for next week's check-up, to somebody who booked ten days ago, is no longer a conversation: it's a template. And the recall to somebody who hasn't been in for six months simply doesn't fit.
It also brings a cost per conversation, which the provider usually passes on as bundles; the possibility of having to change your number, because a number can't be on the app and on the API at the same time; and dependence on Meta, whose outages and policy changes hit you directly.
In exchange, it's a channel with official verification and scalable to enormous volumes. For a group with fifty practices it makes sense. For a practice with a number its patients have kept for years, the sums look different.
Route 2: the WhatsApp's own session
The other way is to link the practice's WhatsApp to a program the same way you link WhatsApp Web: you scan a QR code and, from then on, the program reads and writes on that same account. The number stays the practice's, the app stays on the reception phone and the assistant works from the same session.
There's no 24-hour window: the assistant can message whoever it needs to, whenever it needs to — next week's reminder, the invitation to a check-up for somebody who hasn't been in for six months, the heads-up that a slot has opened — as a normal conversation. No new number. And as soon as somebody at reception replies in a chat, a well-made assistant steps back in that conversation and doesn't write again until it's reactivated.
It's the normal route in ClaudIA, and it's a product decision: half of what an assistant does in a practice — confirming, reminding, recovering check-ups, flagging a free slot — happens outside any 24-hour window.
What to ask before you sign
Whichever provider it is, these four questions separate what they tell you from what you'll actually live with. First: which route does it use to connect to WhatsApp? If it's the official API, ask about the 24-hour window and the templates; if it's the number's own session, ask what happens when reception replies from the phone. Second: do we have to change our number? Third: what does the month with the most conversations of the year cost? Fourth, the one that exposes everything: what happens to the reminder for a patient who hasn't written in weeks?
It doesn't mean the official API is bad: it's the right route for enormous volumes and for brands that need Meta's verification. It means that, for a practice, the route chosen decides whether the assistant can do half of its job or only the other half, and that decision deserves a question before you sign, not a surprise afterwards.