A little setup.
A familiar voice.
Tell it how your business works. Hear it answer. Then let it take the next call while you get on with the person in front of you.
About twenty minutes. No developer needed.
Let’s get your receptionist ready.
Seven small steps, with the things you already know. Keep your service list handy.
Tell it about the business
Your name, trade and timezone give the agent its starting brief.
The little details
Name, trade, timezone. Picking your trade is what loads the brief — the vocabulary your callers use, what to write down every time, and the things your agent must never say all arrive with it, before you have typed anything else. This is the step that separates an agent that understands a balayage from one that has read your website. Two minutes.
Add your services and prices
Set the services, durations, prices and deposits it can quote.
The little details
The list it quotes from, seeded with what your trade usually offers so you are editing rather than starting from an empty table. Each service carries a duration, which is what stops a ninety-minute appointment being booked into a thirty-minute gap, and a deposit if you take one. Anything not on the list, it says it will check rather than inventing a number. Five minutes, and the one step worth doing carefully.
Set your opening hours
Add your working hours, holidays and closures.
The little details
It answers around the clock, and it knows when you are actually open — so “are you open Sunday?” gets your answer, in your timezone, rather than a hedge. Holiday closures and off-season dates go in here too, and the booking tools refuse them whatever diary is connected. One minute.
Give it your answers
Use your website or write answers to the questions you hear most.
The little details
Point it at your website and it reads your existing pages, or write short answers to the things you are asked constantly. It quotes those and only those. This is also the step you never really finish: anything it could not answer comes back as a gap with the caller's exact words, you answer it once, and it is answered forever after. Five minutes now, and it improves itself from there.
Pick a voice and hear it
Preview eight voices, then put your own agent through a real conversation.
The little details
Eight voices, each with a preview you can play. Then call your own agent from the dashboard and put it through the calls you actually get — the price question, the awkward one, the person who interrupts. Nothing is live until you publish, so this is where you find out whether it is any good with nothing at stake. Take as long as you like.
Put one line on your website
Add the website widget. This channel is included on the free plan.
The little details
A single script tag, pasted into your footer. It renders in its own shadow root, so it cannot break your site's styling and your site cannot break it — which is why it is safe to do this on a Friday. This channel runs on the free plan, so it is the cheapest way to have it answering something real. Two minutes.
Add a phone number, with a paid plan
A number of your own comes with the paid plans. Email us about one.
The little details
A number comes with the paid plans. Search live carrier inventory, pick a number in your area code, and it answers every call on it — with a warm transfer to you when the caller needs a person. Point your listings at it, or forward your existing line to it, which takes two minutes with your carrier and is reversible. Included from Essential up.
Give the prices a little extra care. Your callers will ask.
Then the phone rings.
A question, an appointment, someone who needs you. Here’s how the conversation finds its way.
A hello that sounds like your business.
The opening line is yours — you read it back during setup, so what callers hear first is never a surprise. This is what a new salon's agent says, before anybody edits anything:
“Hi, thanks for calling Willow & Co Hair Studio, this is Nova — are you calling to book an appointment?”
“Just so you know, I'm the salon's AI assistant and this call is recorded.”
About the greeting and recording
That second sentence ships on, in each trade's own words, because every call here is recorded and transcribed and the caller is owed both facts. You can take it off — some owners will, and a caller who hangs up at the word AI is a lost booking — but then telling them is yours to do, so we note who switched it off and when. From there the agent is deciding between four things: a question, a booking, somebody who wants a person, and somebody selling you search engine optimisation.
“How much is a cut?”
It answers from your services, prices, hours and written answers. If the answer isn’t there, it says it will check, takes a message and saves the question in the caller’s own words.
“Could I book Thursday?”
It checks your diary before offering a time and writes the appointment there. With no bookable diary, it takes a request for you to confirm — and tells the caller it is a request.
“This really can’t wait.”
Your trade’s brief tells it what counts as urgent. It stops trying to book, captures the details and raises an urgent message for your team.
“Can I speak to someone?”
On the phone, it can make a warm transfer to the number you set. If nobody answers, it takes a message: a callback task with the caller’s number and whether it can be dialled.
Still your front desk.
You decide what it knows, when it answers, and when you want to step in.
A helping hand.
You keep the keys.
Nothing is live until you publish
You build it, you call it yourself, and it answers nobody until you say so. Unpublishing is one action and takes effect on the next call.
Every change re-publishes the agent
Change a price, add a payment method, edit an answer — the agent is rebuilt with it. There is no second place to remember to update, and no way for the website and the phone to disagree.
You can read every call
Recording and transcript, inbound and outbound, months later. When somebody says “your receptionist told me”, you can go and look.
It tells you what it got wrong
Every question it could not answer is a gap in your dashboard, with what the caller actually asked. Most answering services never tell you what they fumbled.
Back at your desk.
See what was booked, who needs a call back, and what was said.
The booking, or the request.
An appointment in your diary, or a request waiting for your confirmation.
How booking requests work
A booking in the diary, or a booking request waiting for one tap from you. A waiting request holds nothing: the time stays bookable until you confirm, and a confirmation somebody else has overtaken tells you the slot has gone rather than double-booking you.
A message to follow up.
The caller’s number, their own words and when they need you back. Urgent messages are marked.
Who takes the callback?
A callback task carrying the caller's number and whether it can be dialled at all, every message that call left in the caller's own words, and the time the agent promised a call back by.
That task arrives unassigned: everyone on the team who can clear callbacks sees it in the app and as a push on their phone rather than by email, and any of them can take it, assign it to somebody, or — on a plan with a number of its own — have the agent ring the person back with one tap.
The urgent ones marked urgent, so a caller who said it could not wait is not one line down from a question about opening hours.
The conversation, kept.
Read what was said, find the caller’s details and see the questions your receptionist couldn’t answer.
What the call record includes
A call record with the transcript, so you can read what was actually said. Bookings, requests and messages are there while the caller is still on the line; the transcript follows the call, usually within about a minute.
A contact, built from what the caller told it.
A knowledge gap for anything it could not answer — which is how the agent gets better.
The details are there when you have a moment.
Your first caller can be you.
Start free, add your business details, and hear your own receptionist before you publish.
Ready when you are.