The AI agent

The AI agent is an extension that never puts anyone on hold. It answers in English and understands a caller who speaks Yiddish. It says your greeting, knows who is calling from your contacts, answers questions from the facts you gave it, transfers callers to the right person or group, takes a message when nobody is free, and writes down what happened on every call so you can read it afterwards. The product page is at vocatech.com/ai-agent.

What happens on a call

1. Before the greeting, the agent matches the caller's number against your contacts or a list of your own, and reads the caller's recent calls and texts with you. A known caller is greeted by name.
2. The caller hears your greeting, word for word. Outside your hours they hear the after-hours greeting; on a date you marked closed, the holiday greeting.
3. The agent answers questions from the Instructions on its Persona tab and the questions and answers on its Knowledge tab. For prices, items and the long lists, it searches the documents you uploaded and states only what is written there. If it does not have the answer, it says so; it does not guess.
4. A caller who asks for a person is put through using the Transfer directory: a word like sales, support or billing, and the extension, hunt group or call center it goes to. The agent can ask the person first, and when everyone in that department is already on a call it offers to hold or to take a message, whichever you chose.
5. When nobody can take the call, the agent takes a message: the caller's name, their number, and what it is about. It emails it, texts it, or both, or posts it into your own system.
6. Outside your business hours it says your closed message, takes messages, and does not transfer.

Setting it up

Open AI Agents in the portal and pick the agent. Everything is on one page, with tabs:

• Overview. Today's calls, how many the agent handled start to finish, how many it transferred, how many messages it took, where callers ended up, and anything that needs fixing, like a caller who asked for a person and reached nobody.
• Persona. Whether it answers, the voice and the tone (press Test to hear your greeting either way), the greeting, your business hours, the after-hours greeting, holidays, outgoing calls, and the Instructions: everything the agent knows about the business, up to 12,000 characters. Write facts, not adjectives.
• Jobs. What the agent does on a call, each job with the action that carries it out. The built-in jobs are switches: transfer callers, answer questions, take messages, recognize callers, read the caller's history, look up a person or department on a list. Add a job from the library (book an appointment, order status, take an order, take a pledge, sales lead, support request) or write your own. A job's action can call your own system through its API: look up an order, an appointment or an account and read it back to the caller, or post a booking, an order or a ticket. The address, the key and what to send are set once; the key is stored encrypted.
• Routing. The transfer directory, the keys a caller can press instead of talking, whether the agent hands off or asks the person first, where a caller goes when nothing fits, what happens when everyone is on a call, and the lines whose unanswered calls land on this agent.
• Knowledge. The questions and answers, read on every call (import a CSV, or add them one at a time), and the documents the agent searches during a call or matches callers against.
• Testing. Hear the greeting, talk to the agent by text or by voice with the office open or closed and everyone on a call, have it call you, and look something up the way a caller would. Nothing there is saved or sent.
• Advanced. How many calls it can take at once (the lines) and the most minutes it may use in a month.
• Reports. Every call: the conversation, what was written down, whether that reached you, what the agent looked up, and the time on the phone.

Nothing saves on its own. Make the change, press Save, and the agent uses it on its next call.

Instructions, questions and answers, or a document?

The handful of facts a receptionist repeats all day belong in the Instructions: hours, address, who to ask for, what you sell. A question and its answer belong on the Knowledge tab; the agent reads all of them on every call. A document is for the long material: a full price list, a service list, a team directory. The agent searches a document only when a caller asks about something on it, which keeps calls fast.

What it costs

$9.95 a month per line. A line is one call at a time, and an account has at least two lines, so a transfer always has a path. Plus $0.20 a minute while the AI is on the line, counted by the second. No charge for a call the agent did not answer. The Reports tab keeps a running count of the minutes for this month and last; the invoice is the final word. See understanding your invoice.

Getting it

Ask us and we switch it on for your account, build the first agent with you, and load the first list and the transfer directory. It works alongside your auto attendants and hunt groups, not instead of them.