Launch Your Automatic Aligner Design in Minutes

Aligner labs used to scale one designer at a time. Hire someone, train them on OrthoPlus, give them a CAD seat, wait six months for them to be productive. AlignerBot collapses that loop.

Subscribe to GuideMia OrthoPlus. Install one Windows tray app. Flip a switch. Your workstation is now a clear-aligner design pipeline that runs unattended — answering to your lab in Cympha, driving every stage of OrthoPlus, and returning a review file for the doctor to approve.

The setup is four steps. The runtime is hands-off. Here's how, end to end.

Before you start

You need three things:

A Windows workstation with a GPU that runs OrthoPlus comfortably. (If you're already doing aligner design manually, this is the machine you already use.)
A Cympha account — sign up at app.cympha.com; the trial is 15 days.
A way to receive payouts — a bank account your lab can be paid into. You don't need this configured to install AlignerBot; you'll need it before doctors pay you.

Time budget: about 30 minutes from cold start to "ready to take a case."

Step 1 — Subscribe to GuideMia OrthoPlus

AlignerBot doesn't ship its own designer. It drives GuideMia OrthoPlus — the same orthodontic-planning software a human designer would use. Every Happy Button in OrthoPlus that a person would click, AlignerBot clicks. Same outputs, same files, same review experience.

Start your OrthoPlus subscription on the GuideMia software site. One subscription licenses the workstation; you can run AlignerBot against unlimited cases from that machine. Check the tier before you buy: AlignerBot itself is included from Starter, CBCT and facial-scan inputs start at Studio, and aligner design for direct printing and retainers, automatic aligner trim-path generation and Case Restart are Enterprise only.

If you already use OrthoPlus, you're done with this step. Skip to step 2.

Time: 10 minutes (mostly entering payment).

Step 2 — Register on Cympha as AlignerBot

Open app.cympha.com and sign up. At the onboarding step, pick the AlignerBot role.

This is the role that tells Cympha you're not a human designer — you're an automated pipeline running OrthoPlus on a specific workstation. Cases routed to AlignerBot accounts behave differently from cases routed to human designers: they get picked up unattended, run through OrthoPlus end-to-end, and return a review file without anyone touching the workstation.

After role selection, subscribe to Cympha. That's what lets your AlignerBot account accept cases from doctors at any lab you join.

Time: 5 minutes.

Step 3 — Install the Cympha Agent Manager

From your Cympha dashboard sidebar, click Download agent. The installer is small (~11 MB). Run it. It lives in your Windows system tray afterwards.

First launch:

Right-click the tray icon and pick Pair to Cympha….
Type the email address on your Cympha account and click Send pair request. No browser page opens.
On the Cympha page you already have open, a Cympha Agent pair request dialog appears — it names the machine, its OS, the agent version and the install ID, and it will not close until you answer. Click Approve.

The Agent Manager is the bridge: it watches your Cympha case queue from one side and drives OrthoPlus on your workstation from the other. Nothing in OrthoPlus changes — AlignerBot just operates it the way a person would.

Time: 5 minutes (most of it waiting on the installer).

Step 4 — Start AlignerBot from the tray

Right-click the Agent Manager tray icon. Pick Start AlignerBot.

That's it. The agent is now listening to your Cympha queue. Idle until a case arrives.

You can leave the workstation locked, screen off, no one logged in. AlignerBot wakes the relevant pieces when it needs them.

Time: 30 seconds.

The first case, end to end

A doctor anywhere — your existing customer, a clinic you met at a meeting last month, a colleague you invited last week — submits an aligner case to your lab. However you met, they connect to you the same way: Cympha has no lab directory to browse, so the doctor searches by your lab name or by your lab manager's name or email, and picks you.

From your side, without you touching anything:

Case lands in your Cympha queue. Status: Submitted. The intake AI parses the doctor's description and fills the structured fields.
Lab manager triages. (That's you, until you have one.) Set the case to Designing from the status dropdown — it previews who will receive the case before you commit, and hands it to whichever designer or AlignerBot seat on your roster is carrying the fewest open cases.
AlignerBot wakes. Files download to a workspace folder on your workstation. OrthoPlus opens with the case data preloaded.
The Happy Buttons fire. Occlusion plane → fix jaw models → crown boundaries → tooth segmentation → post-processing → alignment → movement plan → attachments → aligner generation. Each step, one click — except no human is clicking.
Plan uploaded. AlignerBot pushes the result file back to the case. Status: Awaiting Approval. The doctor gets a notification.

You haven't loaded a file. You haven't moved data between folders. You haven't opened OrthoPlus.

The review loop

The doctor opens the case page. The plan is right there. On the plan file they pick View in 3D viewer — that opens it in Cympha Studio in their browser. No install, no plugin.

They rotate the model. Step through the staging. Tighten a movement they didn't love. Swap an attachment.

A signed-in reviewer can push the revised plan straight back to the case without downloading anything. Nothing gets quietly overwritten: the case carries an append-only event log covering 22 kinds of activity — every file added, every status move, every comment — so both sides can read back exactly what happened and when.

Approving is a separate, deliberate act. Nobody approves inside Studio. The case header offers Review and Approve, which opens the case's approve page so the doctor sees the files and the lab slip before signing off.

From there the case goes one of two ways:

Re-run the design. If the doctor wants changes, they attach a structured revision artifact — an XML tooth-position file exported from Studio's 3D review, or a .gos.gpk transfer pack saved from the Planner — and use Re-run design. AlignerBot picks the revised plan up, re-runs the downstream OrthoPlus steps, and the updated review file comes back for approval on its own.

Manual polish. Or you (or a designer on your team) open the adjusted plan in OrthoPlus on the workstation, refine by hand, save back. The case takes the new file, the doctor sees the updated review, approves, you bill.

Both flows end the same way: doctor approves, case bills automatically, money lands on schedule. The doctor never installs software to review, and never has to describe a change in prose and hope it was read the way they meant it — that is the Dialogue dimension of a Living Case doing its job.

What you actually do on a busy day

In the old workflow a designer sat with every case — loading files, repairing scans, nudging segmentation, clicking through staging, placing attachments — and the queue only moved while somebody was at the keyboard.

In the new one, AlignerBot takes those steps. Your time concentrates where it matters:

Triage — set new cases to Designing and let the router hand them out.
Spot-check — for cases where the doctor flags a concern, open the plan in OrthoPlus and refine by hand.
Edge cases — cases AlignerBot can't confidently finish (unusual scans, very complex movements) get flagged for human review.

Two things change beyond the clock. The queue keeps moving after everyone has gone home, which is the difference between wondering what is sitting unfinished overnight and knowing — peace of mind no extra hire buys you. And your designers stop spending the day on button sequences they could do in their sleep and spend it on the cases that need a trained eye. That is work worth putting your lab's name on.

What this is not

AlignerBot is not a full automation that takes you out of the loop. It's the opposite — it lets you stay in the loop where your judgment matters, and gets out of the way where it doesn't.

Not a black box. Every step OrthoPlus runs is reviewable. Every Happy Button is auditable. A human can intervene at any stage.
Not a vendor takeover. The lab keeps the brand, the customer relationship, the margin, the data. Cympha is the connection layer.
Not a replacement for your designers. It's an amplifier. Your designer's time goes from clicking Happy Buttons to making clinical judgment calls.

This is what "AI for the heavy lift, human for the clinical call" actually looks like in production.

Scaling beyond one workstation

When one AlignerBot install isn't enough, add another. Each workstation is paired to your Cympha account, and there's no central bottleneck: every install runs its own OrthoPlus locally, so capacity grows with each workstation you pair rather than queuing behind one shared service.

You can also mix human designers and AlignerBot seats on the same roster. Cympha routes each case by the role the status calls for, then to whoever is carrying the fewest open cases — and it keeps a case with the person who handled the last cycle, so a plan-approved case comes back to the same hands for the appliance round. When a case needs your senior designer specifically, the lab manager assigns them from the Case Queue with Assign Designer.

What to do next

You can have your first AlignerBot case running tonight. Specifically:

Subscribe to OrthoPlus — 10 minutes.
Register on Cympha as AlignerBot — 5 minutes.
Install the Agent Manager from your Cympha sidebar — 5 minutes.
Right-click the tray, Start AlignerBot — 30 seconds.

Then advertise an automated clear-aligner service to your network. The cases will route to your lab, AlignerBot will run them, the doctors will approve, and the platform will bill.

That's a clear-aligner business that scales on case volume rather than headcount. There has never been such a thing before AlignerBot.

Cookbook #7 in our series. AlignerBot lives at /alignerbot; install Cympha Agent Manager from your dashboard sidebar at app.cympha.com. Next entry: how a lab's AI-assistance settings decide which suggestions get applied automatically and which wait for a human.