teckel: FAQ

Benedict is teckel's AI voice agent for assisting with dental compliance documentation. Your team can retrieve, view, and complete the compliance documents you rely on — consent forms, patient surveys, procedural and cleaning specifications — just by asking, with the conversation and the document shown side by side. Benedict takes the drudgery out of the process: your team provides the answers, Benedict does the rest.

You ask Benedict for what you need in plain language — for example, "show me the crown consent form." Benedict brings the document up in a viewer next to your conversation, so you can read, complete, and submit it in one place. You can speak or type, answer several questions in one breath, and correct anything at any time; when you submit, the finished paperwork is emailed to your practice.

Benedict also keeps track of every document's status and dates — ask "what's due this month?" or "when did I last submit the sharps audit?" and he answers from your practice's own records. Tell him a document's review schedule and he keeps to it, or ask for a status report by email.

Yes. Benedict takes typed messages as well as speech, so on a voice call you can type the fiddly things (an email address, a serial number, a reading) and say the rest. Working by text costs less than a voice call, because there is no speech to generate or transcribe. Text alone is slower when the answers are flowing, but you can stop and think, get interrupted, and come back to it.

Short pauses are fine — stop to check a cupboard or read something over and Benedict simply waits; five minutes is a long time to think. But a voice call left open in silence is still drawing on your credits, so if nobody has said anything for about five minutes Benedict ends the call himself to protect your balance. It is deliberate, not a fault.

Nothing is lost when that happens: reconnect in the same tab and carry on where you were. For a planned break, say “save it, I’ll come back” and Benedict will say goodbye and end the call for you — resuming later is seamless. And if you are working by text rather than on a voice call, you can pause as long as you like.

Benedict is browser-based, so a session works on any device with a web browser — desktop, laptop, tablet or phone — and staff need nothing installed.

The teckel App is still needed, on an Android phone or iPhone (there is no iPad version): it is where your Benedict is created, where access codes are generated, and where you top up — so keep it installed (see How do I get started?).

Benedict supports the compliance documents required of dental practices in England today; the other UK nations, each with its own regulator, are on the roadmap (see “Which dental regulator does teckel support?” below).

The catalogue covers consent forms, risk assessments, daily and weekly logs, surveys, policies and incident reports — ask Benedict for the whole list, or say "show me my document directory" to see it on screen, traffic-lit by status — plus guidance documents and a library of your practice's own documents: certificates, service records and photographs.

Ask. "What's overdue?", "what's due within a month?", "what haven't I started yet?" — Benedict answers from your practice's own records. Or say "show me my document directory" and the whole catalogue opens on screen with a traffic-light tag on every form — overdue, due soon, in date, never submitted — each tag in words as well as colour.

Forms with no review schedule set are shown as exactly that, so a gap can't hide. Tell Benedict a form's schedule once and the traffic lights keep track from then on.

See the traffic lights for real: Benedict in action — a tour in screenshots.

Today Benedict supports practices regulated in England by the Care Quality Commission (CQC). Support for the other UK nations — overseen by Healthcare Improvement Scotland, Healthcare Inspectorate Wales, and the RQIA in Northern Ireland — is on the roadmap.

Yes. Alongside your forms, your catalogue holds guidance documents — official regulations, guidance leaflets and posters. Ask "what does the guidance say about legionella?" and Benedict reads you the relevant passage word for word, names the document it came from, and offers to email you the whole document.

He quotes; he doesn't interpret. On a compliance question the source's exact words are what you can act on and cite — read the quoted passage against the document itself before you rely on it, because the judgement about what applies to your practice stays yours.

Yes. Alongside your guidance documents, your catalogue holds blank letter templates — job offers, suspension letters, disciplinary invitations and the like. Ask Benedict to list them, or to email you one, and it arrives just as a guidance document does; the emailed list marks which ones are letters, so you can tell the two apart at a glance.

He will not read a letter back to you as though it were guidance. A letter is a template for you to complete and send under your own name — its wording is a starting point, not an authority to quote. So if you ask what the rules say about suspending a member of staff, Benedict answers from the guidance and, separately, offers you the blank letter. He does not blur the two.

Yes. Say "I'd like to attach the fire safety certificate" and a secure upload page opens beside the form; the same link is emailed to your practice, so you can upload from whichever device actually holds the file — usually the phone the photograph is on.

Give each document a name you'll recognise, and use one as the answer to a question where a document says more than a sentence can — a signed staff declaration, a service record, an inspection certificate. The finished form then names the document it relies on.

Yes. Tell Benedict "add a question to the patient survey" — or to any standard form — and confirm when he reads it back. You can also switch off standard questions that don't apply to your practice; regulator-standard questions always stay. Every submission is recorded against your practice account, with what was recorded and when, so your paperwork remains inspection-ready. Everyone in the practice works in the same account, so the record names the practice account, not the individual.

No. Benedict helps your practice organise, retrieve, and complete its compliance documentation; it is a documentation tool that supports your compliance process. It does not provide legal, regulatory, or clinical advice, and it does not replace your professional judgement or your practice's responsibility for meeting your regulator's requirements. You remain responsible for the accuracy and completeness of your records.

Benedict is an AI assistant, and AI can make mistakes — he can mishear a word or record an answer against the wrong question — so please check every form on screen before you submit it; any form can be corrected afterwards.

Yes. Tell Benedict "open the last Crown consent and change question 27" and he opens a fresh editable copy with the change applied; make any further changes, then say "submit". The original submission stays in the audit trail and the new copy supersedes it.

Benedict never removes a submitted form, and you cannot remove one through him — it is your practice's compliance record. (How long its stored copy is kept depends on pinning — see “How does teckel store our compliance documents?” below.) A draft you don't want can be removed.

Download the teckel App (on the App Store or Google Play) and use it to create your Benedict. Once it is set up, you and your team use Benedict in any web browser. The private link to your Benedict arrives by email when you create it — if you ever lose that email, you can have the link re-sent from the wizard page.

Want to see it first? Watch the full walkthrough.

benedict@teckel.io. Submission emails, reports and notifications arrive from that address, so add it to your safe senders. Practices that joined before September 2026 received their first welcome email from no_reply@teckel.io — that address still delivers, it is just no longer what the From line says.

You choose which emails you receive at teckel.io/email-preferences: marketing and general updates, and the notifications from your Benedict, per address. Messages that are part of using the service are always sent — for example the one-time code when you restore an account, the confirmation that a backup was stored, and anything you ask Benedict for, such as your complete archive. Access codes appear in the teckel App rather than by email, and receipts for tc purchases come from Apple or Google.

There isn't one as such — and you don't need one. Benedict is pay-as-you-go: no sign-up fee, no subscription, and no card to register with us — you top up in the teckel App through the App Store or Google Play. Watch the full walkthrough, then set up your Benedict and complete one form for a few pounds. Keep going if it suits you, stop if it doesn't.

When someone needs to use your Benedict, you generate an access code in the teckel App, from the same account that created the Benedict. A code expires about 15 minutes after you generate it — there is no permanent shared password.

Generating one takes a moment: in the teckel App, open the account and tap “Generate Access Code”. A box opens in the middle of the screen headed Access Code, showing the six digits in large figures, and it stays open until you tap Close — so you can read the code across to another device without it disappearing part-way through. Within the 15 minutes the same code simply works again, so if a call drops you reconnect with the code you already have.

teckel is pay-as-you-go. You buy teckel credits (tc) and only pay for what you use — no subscriptions, per-seat licence fees or minimum-term contracts.

A session's total is shown on screen when it ends, and Benedict never interrupts you mid-form — if your balance is running low he mentions it once, and you top up in the teckel App. If your balance is empty when you come to submit, he tells you, and your answers are kept until you top up.

No. Ask Benedict once for a survey's or a log's web link — he can open it in a new tab or email it to your practice — and hand it to whoever has the answers: patients fill in the survey on any phone or computer, and each entry lands in the same log. The same link keeps working all week, so ask once and reuse it. When the entries are in, ask Benedict to submit the log — submitting is what makes it part of your compliance record.

teckel credits are priced at £1 = 500,000 tc, so 1,000,000 tc is £2.00 excluding tax, with bulk discounts of up to 12.5% on larger top-ups. You buy tc through in-app purchases on the App Store or Google Play, which show the final price for your region at checkout, with tax included where applicable.

A balance at zero or below stops more than Benedict — everything that bills to that balance stops with him. He is switched off, not deleted, and your forms and answers stay in your account; the services simply stop being available until there are credits to draw on. Your stored documents are a different matter — see below.

Top up in the teckel App and allow up to about an hour for Benedict to come back — the one case where a top-up is not usable the moment it lands. You should rarely meet it: Benedict mentions a low balance once during a session before it becomes a problem, and the App shows your balance at any time.

Your submitted forms and evidence files are kept, whatever your balance. Since 22 September 2026, an unpaid balance does not remove the forms and evidence files you submit through Benedict from teckel’s storage: they stay pinned there — actively held in place — although keeping them stored still draws on your balance, even when nobody is using Benedict, and you are sent warnings as the balance falls. Other files you store in the teckel App — things you upload outside Benedict — can be removed to free storage space while the balance cannot cover them, and topping up afterwards does not bring them back. You also decide what stays pinned: in the teckel App you can unpin a document and stop paying to keep it stored. An unpinned document may be deleted at any time, so keep your own copy first. Unpinning is not erasure, though: what teckel holds on IPFS is stored in two places, in two buildings, and unpinning does not remove the second copy.

You already hold your own copy, and that is what protects you. Every time you submit a form, teckel emails your practice the finished paperwork with the PDF and the original document attached. Those attachments are unencrypted, they open without teckel, and they are permanently yours — save them somewhere the practice controls. While Benedict is available you can also ask him to “email me my complete archive”: he sends every submitted form and evidence file he can still retrieve to your practice’s registered address, in batches, and names anything he cannot — for those, the original submission email is your copy. That exists deliberately, so what you create is not trapped in teckel.

In the teckel App’s setup wizard, step 7 — “Got a promo or referral code?”, straight after the step that asks for your notifications email — has an optional Promo or referral code box. Type the code there — the offer running at the time is described on that screen, above the box. During a show offer the box is already filled in with the code. If your Benedict was set up before the offer began, there is no wizard to run: enter a promo code on our Get the App page instead — the offer applies to your first tc purchase during the offer period, new or existing. A colleague’s referral code can only be entered in the App’s wizard, when a Benedict is created.

The notifications-email step has an optional tick box for hearing about future teckel credit bonuses and other promotions. It is not ticked by default, nothing else in the product depends on it, and every email it produces carries an unsubscribe link.

When you buy teckel credits through in-app purchases, the App Store or Google Play is the seller for tax purposes, so any receipt or VAT invoice comes from the store rather than from teckel.

On Google Play, sign in to your Google payments centre at payments.google.com, open the transaction, and choose "Download VAT invoice or receipt" — you may be asked for your business address or tax ID (in some countries the tax ID must be added before you buy). On the App Store, Apple emails a receipt for every purchase and keeps it in your purchase history; if you need a formal VAT invoice, contact Apple with that receipt and your VAT number.

Because the stores handle the sale and the tax, teckel does not issue a separate invoice for in-app purchases.

No — teckel is pay-as-you-go, so you only ever pay for what you use. There is a one-time bonus on installation: the first account created on the device receives 50,000 teckel credits (tc). To see it working before you spend anything, watch the full walkthrough.

The documents you submit are stored in encrypted form on IPFS (the InterPlanetary File System), a decentralized, content-addressed file system. With content addressing, every file is identified by a cryptographic hash of its own contents — so a stored document is tamper-evident and auditable: if even one byte changed, its address would change.

Your files are stored in two places, in two buildings, on teckel's own IPFS servers, and they can be downloaded and pinned to other IPFS nodes. What sits on the network is unreadable ciphertext: only teckel can decrypt a record, and it gives records back only to the practice they belong to — anyone who found a copy could not read a word.

Keeping them there does not depend on your balance. teckel’s pinning is what keeps your documents retrievable, and since 22 September 2026 the forms and evidence files you submit stay pinned whatever your balance — other files on the account do not; see “What happens if I run out of teckel credits?” above. You are not dependent on teckel’s storage alone: every submission is emailed to your practice as it happens, and while Benedict is available you can ask him to “email me my complete archive”. The teckel App also lets you unpin a document yourself. An unpinned document may be deleted at any time — but unpinning is not erasure, because the second copy is not removed with it.

Yes. The compliance documents you submit are encrypted before they are stored, and only teckel can decrypt them for your practice — a copy taken elsewhere is unreadable. They are also stored in two places, in two buildings. You are not locked in: while Benedict is available you can ask him to “email me my complete archive” and receive every submitted form as a readable PDF, with your evidence files in their original formats. Your teckel account is secured by a private key held on your device — teckel never holds a key it can read, and the optional backup is encrypted with a passphrase only you know. The archive can only ever go to your practice's registered address; there is deliberately no way to send it anywhere else.

Yes — you always hold your own copy. Every submission is emailed to your practice as it happens, as a PDF plus the original document format, so save those attachments somewhere of your own. teckel's own copy is stored in two places, in two buildings.

While Benedict is available you can also say "email me a list of everything I've submitted" for a manifest with dates and record references, or "email me my complete archive" for every submitted form and evidence file exactly as stored (anything that can no longer be retrieved is named in the last email). The archive goes only to your practice's registered address — there is deliberately no way to send it anywhere else.

Show the submission e-mail. When you submit a form, Benedict produces the PDF once: that one file is attached to the e-mail sent to your practice and is also stored, encrypted, in your permanent record on IPFS — in two places, in two buildings. If you ask for your complete archive, the stored file itself comes back to you; it is not printed again.

Don't reprint an old form for an inspector. A new printout is a new document, and it uses today's version of the form, so it is not evidence of what was submitted. The submission e-mail and the archive export are the record.

Every stored record has a permanent reference (its IPFS CID), a fingerprint that changes completely if even one character of the stored file changes, so the stored record cannot be altered without it showing. Ask Benedict to "email me a list of everything I've submitted" to see each submission's date, form, edition and reference. The reference is a fingerprint of the encrypted file, not of your readable PDF, so neither you nor an inspector can check a PDF against it directly: one worked out from your PDF won't match, and the same file can even be given a different reference if it is stored with different settings.

Corrections never overwrite anything. Since 16 September 2026, a corrected form is saved as a new record that permanently points back to the one it replaces. Corrections made before that date don't carry the link.

Keep your own copies. Each submission e-mail carries the PDF, a plain-text version and the original-format document, and only the PDF is kept in your permanent record, so save the e-mails somewhere the practice controls. While Benedict is available you can ask for your complete archive, which is only ever sent to your practice's registered address.

No. Personal-identifying fields — a patient's name, date of birth, contact details — can be left blank on every form: say "skip" and Benedict moves on, and the form still submits. Your practice can complete a full compliance record without writing a single patient identifier into a form. A conversation is different: a session's transcript records what was said, word for word, so avoid saying a patient's name aloud while you work.

The simplest way is a backup. In the teckel App open Accounts, tap Migrate account on your practice’s account and choose Migrate FROM this device — you give an email address and a passphrase. On the new phone, install the App and choose Migrate TO this device with the same email address, a one-time code we send to it, and your passphrase — so make sure the practice can open that inbox; you do not need the old phone to hand. Keep the passphrase somewhere the practice controls, apart from that inbox — without it the backup cannot be restored. (If you don’t see Migrate account on the account’s card, ask us at teckel.io/support before doing anything else.) A newly installed App first creates an empty Account 1 of its own — that is expected; don’t start work in it.

The other route works when both phones are in front of you — the old phone shows a code for the new one to scan:

Move your account across before you stop using the old phone. It takes about a minute, and you need both phones to hand.

1. On your old phone, open the teckel App and go to Accounts.

2. Find the account you have been using and tap Export at the bottom of its card.

3. A Private Key box opens with a warning and no code showing yet. That is normal. Tap Click to reveal… to display the QR code.

4. On your new phone, open the App, go to Accounts, tap Import, scan the code from the old phone's screen, and press Finish.

5. Your account is now on the new phone. Tap Nickname on it and give it a name you will recognise — your practice name is the obvious one. Then select it and use it. One thing to know about this route: a copy that arrives by import can never export the account again — only the phone the account was created on can. So before that phone is replaced, wiped, sold or repaired, talk to us at teckel.io/support.

Your records are reachable again from the new phone as soon as the account is on it.

Two things to know while that code is on screen. Anyone who sees it can take full control of the account, so do this somewhere private with only your own two phones in view, and close the box as soon as the new phone has scanned it.

And never keep a copy of that code anywhere online: no screenshots, no photos, no email to yourself, nothing saved to Google Drive, iCloud or Dropbox. Phone screenshots are usually uploaded to a photo cloud automatically, which is exactly what must not happen.

If you took a backup first (Accounts → Migrate account → Migrate FROM this device), restore it after the reinstall with Migrate TO this device and carry on — with a backup, a reinstall stops being the thing that loses your records. Everything below applies to an account that has never been backed up.

The honest answer is that a reinstall is the one action to avoid, so the best recovery is not needing one.

Update the App — do not uninstall and reinstall it. Use the update offered by Google Play or the App Store. An update keeps your account. A reinstall does not: it removes the App and everything in it, and the App then creates a brand-new, empty account. Moving an account between phones works because the old phone can still display its code — after a reinstall on the same phone there is no code left to display, and nothing to import from.

If you have already reinstalled, tell us — do not assume your records are gone. Contact support and say what happened. We will do what we can, though we cannot promise your records can be moved. Tell us before you build up work in the new account, because the sooner we hear the less there is to reconcile.

If you have not backed up, there is no workaround: contact us first, before you uninstall anything. Please don't try to park your account on a colleague's phone as a way back — a copy that arrives by import cannot be exported onward. That is deliberate: it stops an account being passed from device to device without limit.

If you had taken a backup (Accounts → Migrate account), install the App on the replacement phone and choose Migrate TO this device with the email address you gave, a one-time code we send to it, and your passphrase.

Otherwise, contact support before you start working in the new account. We will do what we can, though we cannot promise your records can be moved, and the tc balance of an account that cannot be restored cannot be moved. Your submitted paperwork is also emailed to your practice every time you submit, so you always hold your own readable copies independently of any phone.

Yes — and nobody else needs to hold the account to do it. Your whole team uses the same Benedict through your practice's web address: each session starts with a short-lived access code that you generate in the teckel App (see “What is the access code?” above), so everyone works on the same records. It is possible to import the practice account onto a colleague's phone, but think hard before you do: whoever holds a copy has full control of the account, and a copy can never be removed from a phone afterwards — not by you and not by us, even after that person leaves.

No. Your teckel account details, including your API key, can change freely without affecting anything you have stored. What your records are tied to is the account itself.

It means your teckel App account isn’t set up yet. Open the App and accept the Terms first — the App automatically creates your account the first time you open it — then tap Create Benedict.

No — not any more. Buying teckel credits (tc) with ETH was a capability of the original full teckel App, which has been discontinued (see the final question below). tc are bought in the teckel App through App Store or Google Play in-app purchases, priced in your local currency with the stores’ own tax handling.

Download the teckel App and open your Accounts (the card icon in the top bar), then use the "Create" function to generate a new Ethereum Account. The App automatically creates a completely random private key / public key address pair for you.

The resulting public address is your teckel App Ethereum address, which also serves as your account identity. We recommend using the "Create" function rather than importing your own key.

No. BUT, if you delete the teckel App data in your phone's settings without first backing up your teckel Ethereum Accounts, you will lose access to all of the Ethereum assets on your device. This is also the case if you uninstall the teckel App. To back an account up, use Accounts → Migrate account → Migrate FROM this device, or keep a copy of its private key in a safe location not on the device. Migrate TO this device can restore the account afterwards, provided you backed it up before deleting the data. (Note: Since exporting private keys of imported Ethereum Accounts is currently not allowed on the teckel App, be sure to back up the private keys of your imported Ethereum Accounts BEFORE you import them into the teckel App!)

Your teckel Ethereum Accounts' private keys are stored in an encrypted area on your Android or Apple device. The only copy that ever reaches teckel is the optional backup (Accounts → Migrate account), which is encrypted on your device with a passphrase only you know: we hold something we cannot read, and we cannot recover the passphrase for you. Furthermore, only private keys generated by Ethereum Accounts created on (not imported into) the teckel App may be exported from the teckel App.

Ethereum addresses are not case sensitive; however, as an added security precaution implemented as an afterthought, Ethereum addresses can be checksum validated in such a fashion to check for potential human data entry errors. For more information please see:

https://ethereum.stackexchange.com/questions/2045/is-ethereum-wallet-address-case-sensitive

Depending on the software from which you are transferring ETH, it may perform this check, thus resulting in a warning.  Therefore, please double-check that your Ethereum address is correct before attempting a transfer of ETH.

Your teckel Account is an Ethereum Account, so ether (ETH) can be sent to its address. That is not what it is for: the teckel App offers no facility for sending ether as part of normal use.

If ether is sent to your Account, the way to move it is to export the Account’s private key from the teckel App (for an Account you imported, use the key you already hold) into other Ethereum software that can send ether. Keep the exported key as secret as the original, and remember that a transaction on the Ethereum blockchain is immutable.

Your tc balance is separate: tc are not ether and are never recorded on the blockchain.

Yes, but it is not recommended for security reasons. (We recommend ONLY using the "Create" function to allow the teckel App to automatically generate a completely random private key / public key address pair as your new Ethereum Account.) Creating one manually means importing it: the teckel App has no way to type a key in under "Create". Tap the card icon in the top bar of the App (your Accounts), tap "Import", and enter the private key under "Recovery Phrase or Private Key" (it can also be scanned as a QR code). You may type in any combination of hexadecimal characters, but the string must be exactly 64 characters.

Ethereum private keys are not case-sensitive because they are simply 256-bit numbers represented in hexadecimal format (64 characters long, using 0-9 and a-f). The hexadecimal system itself is case-insensitive, meaning A-F is equivalent to a-f.

However, Ethereum addresses (derived from private keys) typically use a checksum mechanism when written in EIP-55 mixed-case checksum format, which is case-sensitive. This helps detect typos but does not change the actual underlying address.

There is a danger in generating your own public / private key pair. For example, in manually entering your own private key, if you make a mistake like a typo, or accidentally type a space or use a public key, etc., you could end up with a new public address that has no associated valid private key and therefore any ether (ETH) or NFT transferred into it would be irretrievable.

It is always best practice to only use a completely random set of characters for your private key! Again, we recommend ONLY using the "Create" function to allow the teckel App to automatically generate a completely random private key / public key address pair as your new Ethereum Account in the teckel App.

The original “full” teckel App — a sideloaded Android APK that could create Ethereum smart contracts (MIQYU, PIQYU and TIQYU) and buy, sell and barter them in the teckel NFT Marketplace — has been discontinued, along with those features. There is now one teckel App, available on the App Store and Google Play, and it carries forward the parts that survive: IPFS storage, Ethereum account management, teckel talk and the teckel AI chat.

Assets you created remain on the Ethereum blockchain — what has been retired is the App that provided a marketplace for them. For questions about assets you created with the full App, contact us via our Support page.