The AI agent

The AI agent is a receptionist that never puts anyone on hold. It answers in English and understands a caller who speaks Yiddish. It says your greeting, 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.

What happens on a call

1. The caller hears your greeting, word for word. If you want a notice that they reached an assistant or that the call may be recorded, it is folded into that greeting.
2. The agent answers questions from the Instructions on its Persona tab. For prices, items and the long lists, it searches the sheets on its Knowledge tab and states only what is written there. If the sheet does not have it, the agent says so; it does not guess.
3. 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. Before transferring, the agent can check whether everyone in that department is already on a call and offer to hold or leave a message.
4. 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, and can open a ticket in your own system.
5. 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, and anything that needs fixing.
• Calls. Every call: the conversation, what was written down, whether that reached you, what the agent looked up, and what the time on the phone comes to.
• Persona. The voice (press Test to hear it), the greeting, whether an opening notice is spoken, and the Instructions: everything the agent knows and how it behaves, up to 12,000 characters. Write facts, not adjectives.
• Jobs. Work beyond talking: booking a visit, taking a pledge, taking a detailed request. An agent carries one job at a time.
• Actions. Things the agent may do during a call: send an email or a text, look something up in your own system.
• Knowledge. The sheets. Upload a price list, service list or FAQ as a CSV (first row is column names, every row after it one item). You can read every row on the page, find, add, change and remove one, and try a lookup the way a caller would to see exactly what the agent gets back.
• Routing. The transfer directory, the fallback destination, how transfers happen, where messages go, and business hours.
• Advanced. The switch that turns answering on and off, how many calls it takes at once, a monthly minutes cap, and the trunk it answers on.

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

Instructions or a sheet?

The handful of facts a receptionist repeats all day belong in the Instructions: hours, address, who to ask for, what you sell. A sheet is for the long material: a full price list, a service list, hundreds of questions and answers. The Instructions are read on every call; a sheet is searched only when a caller asks about something on it, which keeps calls fast.

What it costs

$0.25 a minute for the time the agent is on the line, counted by the second, and nothing else: no monthly fee for the agent, no charge for a call the agent did not answer. The Calls tab keeps a running count for this month and last; the invoice is the final word. See understanding your invoice.

Early release

The AI agent is in early release. It is not switched on for every account yet; ask us and we set it up with you, including the first sheet and the transfer directory. It works alongside your auto attendants and hunt groups, not instead of them.