Dental Students' Experiences With an Artificial Intelligence Chatbot to Enhance Clinical Competence in Oral Diseases.

INTRODUCTION AND AIMS: Opportunities for repeated clinical practice in oral disease diagnosis remain limited in undergraduate dental education, particularly during the preclinical and early clinical years. Artificial intelligence (AI)-driven virtual patient systems may help address this gap by providing scalable, interactive, and structured clinical simulations. This study aimed to evaluate dental students' experiences and perceptions of an AI chatbot-based virtual patient platform, AI Patient Simulation for Dental Education (AIDE), designed to enhance clinical competence in oral diseases. METHODS: Fifth-year dental students at Can Tho University of Medicine and Pharmacy participated in a 30-day trial of a virtual patient chatbot powered by a large language model through the AIDE platform. Students engaged in self-directed clinical case simulations and subsequently completed structured questionnaires to evaluate usability, learning experience, clinical confidence, and perceived readiness for practice. RESULTS: All 112 students completed the study, generating 1016 virtual patient interactions. Prior to the intervention, less than one-quarter of students reported confidence in conducting independent clinical examinations and diagnoses. Following platform use, 84.8% reported feeling ready for clinical practice. High satisfaction scores were observed for enhanced clinical readiness (4.31 ± 0.81) and intention to integrate the platform into future learning (4.29 ± 0.69). The platform was also rated highly for ease of use and accurate comprehension of user input, while reports of irrelevant or unfriendly responses were low. CONCLUSION: Use of the AIDE chatbot platform was associated with substantial improvements in dental students' perceived clinical confidence and readiness for practice, along with high levels of user satisfaction. These findings suggest that AI-based virtual patient simulations represent a promising supplementary tool in oral disease education.