Voice assistant savings: the formula, not the promise

Three cost lines, one formula, no percentage

A voice assistant does not produce a savings percentage. It moves three cost lines you can read in your own paperwork: annual saving = (phone hours × loaded hourly employer cost) + annual answering-service invoice + (recovered slots × average value of a procedure), minus the cost of the tool. Every term lives in a document you already hold. A payslip. A supplier invoice. A diary. None of them can be guessed. The first depends on a collective pay scale and on employer contributions that taper with pay. The second depends on a billing unit your contract defines, not the market. The third depends on the fee schedule for the procedures you actually perform. Any vendor quoting a figure before reading those three documents is selling a slogan. This article gives the method and the public source behind each line. It gives no Solva result: we publish no methodology for such a number, so we put none forward.

Gross pay is not the employer cost

Start from the pay scale that binds you. In French dental practices, the sector agreement of 5 December 2024 sets the minimum for a technical secretary at €13.58 per hour, over 151.67 monthly hours. The agreement of 12 February 2026 lifts that minimum by 1.5%, to €13.78 an hour, applicable from 1 January 2026 and extended to the whole branch by order of 15 July 2026. Read the annex matching your own grade. The statutory floor sits at €12.31 per hour since 1 June 2026, that is €1,867.02 gross per month for a 35-hour week. Two rungs of the dental scale now sit below that floor, so the minimum wage applies instead. Then add seniority pay. Article 3.15 of the same agreement sets it at 2% after two full years, then one further point per year, capped at 20%. Then add employer contributions. They carry no fixed multiplier: since 1 January 2026 a single tapering relief applies up to three times the minimum wage and shrinks as pay rises. Replace these French anchors with your own national scale, but keep the order of operations.

• Read the hourly rate in your collective pay scale, not an average.
• Multiply by your contractual monthly hours to get reference gross pay.
• Add seniority pay exactly as your agreement defines it, year by year.
• Compute employer contributions with the official calculator, never a flat multiplier.
• Divide the annual employer cost by hours actually worked.

The answering service is read on the invoice

This line has no regulated price. No public schedule governs medical answering services: the price lives in your contract, not in a reference table. That is exactly why no amount appears here. The method fits in one division. Cost per useful call = the amount billed over twelve months, divided by the number of calls that produced something. An appointment booked, moved or cancelled. A message delivered to the practitioner. That denominator is almost never the provider’s own. Three gaps come back every time. Per-minute billing turns a talkative patient into a budget line. A monthly package charges a dead-end call at the same price as a booked appointment. Overage is settled at month end, outside the comparison the salesperson showed you. Pull twelve invoices, not the latest one. A medical switchboard does not carry the same load in January and in August.

• Add twelve months of invoices, never a single month.
• Count only the calls that produced something in your denominator.
• Isolate overage charges billed outside the advertised package.
• Check whether dead-end calls are billed to you.
• Add the in-house time spent fixing badly taken messages.

An empty slot cannot be billed

For physicians, French law settles the question. Article R.4127-53 of the public health code states that fees may only be claimed for procedures actually performed. A patient who does not turn up is not an unpaid bill. It is a dead loss. The same article adds that mere advice given over the phone opens no right to a fee: time on the line is pure cost, never revenue. The French dental code of conduct carries no such wording; its article R.4127-240 imposes tact and moderation instead. Now value the slot. Take the fee of the procedure that should have filled it. For a French general practitioner at the regulated rate, the consultation is €30 as of 1 January 2026. For a dentist, the consultation has been €23 since 1 January 2025. The preventive oral examination, reserved for ages 3 to 24 and for pregnant women, runs from €40 with no radiograph to €64 with a panoramic view. Weight those fees by how often each procedure actually appears in your diary. Check first whether your own jurisdiction allows a missed-appointment fee at all. Where it does not, the slot is a total loss.

Measure your own no-show rate, not the headline one

The national figure circulates everywhere. On 26 January 2023 the French Academy of Medicine and France’s national medical council warned that 6 to 10% of patients miss appointments each week, roughly 27 million a year. Look at how it is built. The statement invokes “several surveys” without naming them. It takes roughly two hours of consultation time lost per doctor per week, then extrapolates to the whole country. The best-documented French survey shows what those declarations are made of. The regional union of self-employed doctors in Île-de-France emailed 16,000 physicians between 8 and 21 July 2022. The response rate was 13%, that is 2,240 respondents. Of those respondents, 69% reported one to two missed appointments per day, 4% reported more than five. And 80% called it a major problem. That is self-reported data pushed through an extrapolation, not a count. It describes a profession, not your practice. Count yours over four full weeks, diary in hand. The measurement takes an hour and beats every press release combined.

• Count slots left empty, not cancellations you managed to refill.
• Split first-time patients from patients already followed.
• Record the delay between cancellation and appointment time.
• Repeat the measurement a month later, outside school holidays.

What reminders actually change, per randomised trials

A Cochrane review measured what text-message reminders do to attendance at healthcare appointments. Seven randomised trials, 5,841 participants: attendance rises from 67.8% without reminders to 78.6% with them. The risk ratio is 1.14, 95% confidence interval 1.03 to 1.26, rated moderate-quality evidence. Three further trials, 2,509 participants, show text messages perform on a par with phone-call reminders, risk ratio 0.99. Two studies put the cost per attended appointment of a text reminder 55% and 65% below the cost of a phone-call reminder. The authors conclude the evidence remains insufficient to settle a policy decision. Two consequences for your calculation. Apply an attendance delta, never a savings percentage. And do not credit voice with a gain that text messages already deliver: the automated reminder is a separate line in the formula.

Compliance is a line in the calculation

Handing over your phone line means handing over health data. The GDPR classes the provider as a processor. Its Article 28 requires sufficient guarantees, a written contract, processing on documented instructions, a confidentiality commitment from authorised staff, prior authorisation before any sub-processor, and the possibility of audits. Medical confidentiality reaches further. Article L.1110-4 of the French public health code covers any person who, through their activity, is in contact with the establishment. The provider is not exempt. Where data is hosted, Article L.1111-8 requires a contract and a certificate of conformity issued by an accredited body. That certified-hosting requirement is specific to France, so check what your own jurisdiction demands instead of importing it. These duties apply to a human answering service exactly as they apply to a voice assistant. Put them on both sides of your comparison, or the comparison lies.

• Cost the time spent contracting and keeping the processing register.
• Demand the list of sub-processors before you sign.
• Check the health-data hosting certificate, with its number.
• Count the same lines for your current human provider.

What Solva does, and what we refuse to quantify

Solva answers the practice line and identifies the patient. It books, moves or cancels the appointment in the diary. It sends the reminders. It hands the call to the practitioner as soon as the request falls outside its scope. That is what the software does. What we do not do: sell you a percentage. We publish no methodology behind a savings figure, so no such figure appears in this article. What we do provide is your own logs: calls received, calls answered, appointments booked, transfers to the practice, reminders sent. Those counters feed the terms of the formula directly. Before you request any quote, gather three documents. Your reception pay scale. Twelve months of provider invoices. Four weeks of diary. Fill in the formula, then compare the result to the price of the tool, whichever vendor you are looking at. A supplier who refuses that calculation is asking you to take their word for it.

Sources

1. Arrêté du 22 mai 2026 relatif au relèvement du SMIC, Légifrance, 2026 https://www.legifrance.gouv.fr/jorf/id/JORFTEXT000054126589
2. Accord du 5 décembre 2024 relatif aux salaires (applicable au 1er janvier 2025), convention collective des cabinets dentaires (IDCC 1619), Légifrance, 2024 https://www.legifrance.gouv.fr/conv_coll/id/KALITEXT000051352480/?idConteneur=KALICONT000005635655
3. Accord salarial du 12 février 2026 des cabinets dentaires, étendu par arrêté du 15 juillet 2026, CFTC Santé-Sociaux, 2026 https://www.cftc-santesociaux.fr/accord-salarial-2026-cabinets-dentaires-extension/
4. Avenant du 22 février 2024, article 3.15 Prime d’ancienneté, cabinets dentaires, Légifrance, 2024 https://www.legifrance.gouv.fr/conv_coll/id/KALITEXT000049692988/?idConteneur=KALICONT000005635655
5. Urssaf, La réduction générale dégressive unique, 2026 https://www.urssaf.fr/accueil/employeur/beneficier-exonerations/reduction-generale-cotisation.html
6. Urssaf, Taux de cotisations du secteur privé, 2026 https://www.urssaf.fr/accueil/outils-documentation/taux-baremes/taux-cotisations-secteur-prive.html
7. Portail de la fonction publique, Connaître le point d’indice, 2026 https://www.fonction-publique.gouv.fr/etre-agent-public/ma-remuneration/connaitre-le-point-dindice
8. Assurance Maladie, Tarifs conventionnels des médecins généralistes et spécialistes, 2026 https://www.ameli.fr/medecin/exercice-liberal/facturation-remuneration/consultations-actes/tarifs/tarifs-conventionnels-medecins-generalistes-specialistes
9. Assurance Maladie, Tarifs conventionnels des chirurgiens-dentistes, 2025 https://www.ameli.fr/chirurgien-dentiste/exercice-liberal/facturation-remuneration/tarifs-conventionnels/tarifs
10. Code de la santé publique, article R.4127-53, Légifrance, 2026 https://www.legifrance.gouv.fr/codes/article_lc/LEGIARTI000042795663
11. Code de la santé publique, article R.4127-240, Légifrance, 2026 https://www.legifrance.gouv.fr/codes/article_lc/LEGIARTI000042795939
12. URPS médecins libéraux Île-de-France, enquête Rendez-vous non honorés (terrain 8-21 juillet 2022), publiée en 2024 https://www.urps-med-idf.org/wp-content/uploads/2024/02/20240205_urps_CP_etude_rendez-vous_non_honores.pdf
13. Académie nationale de médecine et Conseil national de l’Ordre des médecins, Rendez-vous médicaux non honorés, 2023 https://www.conseil-national.medecin.fr/publications/communiques-presse/rendez-medicaux-honores
14. Gurol-Urganci I. et al., Mobile phone messaging reminders for attendance at healthcare appointments, Cochrane Database of Systematic Reviews, 2013 https://www.cochranelibrary.com/cdsr/doi/10.1002/14651858.CD007458.pub3/full
15. Code de la santé publique, article L.1110-4, Légifrance, 2026 https://www.legifrance.gouv.fr/codes/article_lc/LEGIARTI000043895798
16. Code de la santé publique, article L.1111-8, Légifrance, 2026 https://www.legifrance.gouv.fr/codes/article_lc/LEGIARTI000049577902
17. CNIL, RGPD article 28 Sous-traitant, 2016 https://www.cnil.fr/fr/reglement-europeen-protection-donnees/chapitre4
18. Strafgesetzbuch, Paragraf 203 Absatz 3, gesetze-im-internet.de, 2026 https://www.gesetze-im-internet.de/stgb/__203.html