An AI receptionist answers your phone numbers in a natural voice, and can answer texts too. It answers questions about your business from your company knowledge, transfers callers to the right department or person, and takes a message and emails it to you when nobody's available.
Owners and admins set it up from Admin → Settings → Settings → Call Flows → AI Receptionist, or the 🤖 AI Receptionist button in Visual Flow. You can also add it as a Receptionist panel on the Workspace page.
Before you start
- AI and AI voice are enabled for your account by intSignal. Until they are, the page says "AI features aren't available on this workspace yet… contact your administrator." and the answer switches can't be turned on.
- Turn AI on for your workspace. See Turn AI on.
Create a receptionist
You can have more than one receptionist, such as Main, Sales and Support, each with its own greeting, voice and departments.
- Select New receptionist.
- Name it ("Name this receptionist (e.g. Main, Sales, Support):").
Each receptionist appears as a tab at the top. A turned-off receptionist shows · off.
Let AI fill it in
The quickest start is ✨ Train with AI. Describe your business in a chat, such as what you do, your hours, your teams and who handles what, and it fills in the assistant name, greeting, instructions, departments and directory for you: "Filled in from your chat — review everything below, then click Save."
Settings
Work through these, then select Save.
| Setting | What to enter |
|---|---|
| Assistant name | Up to 60 characters, such as Ava. "It will say it's an AI assistant." |
| Greeting | What callers hear first, up to 500 characters. The default is "Thank you for calling. How can I help you today?" Select Hear the greeting to listen to it. |
| Instructions / about the business | Up to 4,000 characters: what you do, hours, service area, policies, and how to handle common requests |
| Departments the AI can transfer to | A name, such as Billing, and the extension it transfers to |
| Org directory | Up to 100 people or roles, each with a name, role, extension, Where and What they handle. The AI uses this to find the right person. |
| If the AI can't help | Take a voicemail, Transfer to an extension (choose the Fallback extension) or Politely end the call |
| Voice | Default voice or a named voice. Select Sample to hear it. |
| Conversation limit | How many back-and-forth turns before the call is wrapped up, from 2 to 20. The default is 8. |
| Answer callers' questions from the company knowledge base | On by default. See Company knowledge. |
| Email messages to | The address that receives messages the AI takes |
- Extensions in departments and the directory must exist. Invalid departments are dropped when you save: "Saved. Dropped invalid departments: …"
- If you choose Transfer to an extension, a valid Fallback extension is required.
Instructions that work well
Write instructions the way you'd brief a new receptionist:
We're Coastal Plumbing, serving Orange County. Open Monday to Friday 7am–6pm, and Saturday 8am–noon. Emergency callouts are available 24/7. Transfer anyone with a burst pipe or flooding to Emergency immediately. We don't give quotes by phone, so offer to take details for a callback. Never promise arrival times.
Company knowledge
Company knowledge is what the AI answers questions from. It's shared by all your receptionists, and by Assist on your team's calls.
| Add | How it works |
|---|---|
| Link | A page from your website, such as your FAQ or services page. It's read once when you add it. Add it again after the page changes. |
| Note | Type or paste information directly |
| Upload file | PDF, Word (.docx), text, Markdown, CSV, JSON or HTML, up to 12 MB. Scanned PDFs, which are pictures of text, can't be read. |
Up to 50,000 characters of each source are used. After adding or changing sources, select Reindex ("Indexed N sources for smarter answers.").
The AI answers from your company knowledge and says when it isn't sure, rather than guessing.
Test it without a phone
Select Test call (no phone needed), then Start test call. Type what a caller would say, and read the replies. Tags show what the AI decided to do, such as transfer to an extension, take a message or end the call. Select Preview message to see the email a message would produce.
Test a few realistic conversations before you point a number at it: a common question, a request for a department, something you'd like it to decline, and a caller who wants to leave a message.
Put it on a phone number
- Turn on Answer calls with the AI receptionist. A Live badge appears.
- Go to Settings → Numbers & Routing → Phone numbers.
- In the number's AI receptionist column, choose the receptionist.
It answers that number immediately. See Phone numbers.
Reach it from other call flows
To send callers to the receptionist from a ring group's no-answer, a menu option or after-hours business
hours, give it a Failover number, 2 to 6 digits, such as 750. A phone number must already point at
the receptionist. You'll see "Reachable at … for failovers.", and it takes effect immediately.
Before turning it off
If you turn off a receptionist, or AI for your workspace, while a number still points at it, callers to that number hear "Sorry, this number is not available right now. Goodbye." Point the number back at an extension first. A receptionist can't be deleted while numbers point at it.
What happens on a call
- The receptionist greets the caller and has a natural conversation.
- Transfers go only to your listed departments and directory extensions. If a caller asks for someone it can't find, it follows your If the AI can't help choice.
- Taking a message: it gathers the caller's name, callback number, reason and urgency, and emails a summary to Email messages to, titled New message from the caller, with — URGENT for urgent messages. It doesn't record the caller's voice. Messages taken lists the latest 15.
- At the conversation limit, it transfers to your fallback extension if you've set one. Otherwise it says "Thanks for calling — someone will follow up with you. Goodbye." Set a fallback extension so long calls reach a person.
Recent AI-handled calls shows the last 10 calls for the selected receptionist: the caller, the number of turns, and the result (active, transferred, voicemail or done).
Keep it learning
When the AI couldn't answer a question, Email messages to gets "Your AI receptionist needs training (N unanswered questions)", with the transcript. Add the missing answers to your company knowledge.
Answer texts with AI
Turn on Answer text messages (SMS) with the AI to have the receptionist reply to texts sent to its numbers. It can answer questions, share a directory contact, take a message, email someone in your directory, and hand the conversation to your team.
AI replies appear in Messages like any other text, with a banner:
- "The AI assistant is answering this conversation." Select Take over to reply yourself.
- "You're handling this conversation — the AI is paused." Select Resume AI to hand it back.
Sending a reply yourself pauses the AI automatically. When the AI hands a conversation to your team, it stops replying, so check Messages regularly for conversations waiting for a person.
- The AI sends up to 60 replies in a conversation, each up to 600 characters.
- AI replies count toward your workspace's texting limits.
Custom actions (for developers)
Actions & integrations, on the receptionist page, lets the AI call your own systems during a conversation, such as looking up an order status or checking an account. Actions are shared by all receptionists, on calls and texts.
| Field | Enter |
|---|---|
| Name | A lower-case name with underscores, such as order_status |
| Description | What the action does and when to use it, up to 1,000 characters. The AI relies on this. |
| Your endpoint | An https:// address on your server |
| Parameters | Up to 20: a name, a type (string, number or boolean), a description, and whether it's required |
| Signing secret | Enter your own secret and store it on your server, so you can check requests really come from intSignal |
| Enabled | Whether the AI may use it |
Each time the AI uses an action, your endpoint receives a POST with the JSON body
{action, arguments, tenantId, at} and these headers:
X-UCaaS-Action: the action name.X-UCaaS-Signature:sha256=followed by the HMAC-SHA256 of the request body, using your signing secret. Check it before acting on the request.
Your endpoint must respond within 6 seconds, and the first 4,000 characters of the response are used. Only declared parameters are sent. Select Test to send sample values to your endpoint, and you'll see OK or the error, such as "Your endpoint returned 500." or "Your endpoint timed out."
Verify identity on your server
Treat every action request as untrusted. Before returning anything sensitive, your endpoint must check that the person is entitled to it, for example by requiring both the order number and the ZIP code on the order as parameters, and checking they match. Don't rely on the Only after identity is verified option to do this for you.