Transfers and contacts
The AI can put a caller through to a real person mid-call. It is off until you name someone to transfer to — with no transfer contact configured, the AI doesn’t have the option at all and takes a message instead.
Set up a contact
Section titled “Set up a contact”Contacts live in Settings → AI Receptionist → Contacts & Transfer.
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Add a contact — name, phone number, and a role (owner, manager, or other). Add as many as you like; they’re a shared address book, not a transfer list.
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Pick the transfer target under Transfer Calls To. Exactly one contact holds this role at a time.
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Make a test call and ask for a person. The AI should say it’s putting you through.
Contacts do double duty: the same list supplies the backup contact for emergency dispatch, which is a separate choice from the transfer target.
When the AI transfers
Section titled “When the AI transfers”It reaches for a transfer in three situations:
- the caller asks to speak to a human;
- there’s an emergency that needs a person immediately;
- it can’t help the caller effectively.
Everything else — a question it can answer, a job it can book, a price in your catalog — it handles itself. If you want it to hand over more often, say so in custom instructions (“if anyone asks about warranty work, put them through to me”).
What each side hears
Section titled “What each side hears”The caller is told they’re being transferred and asked to hold. While they wait they hear your hold experience — background music and a spoken message, mixed together, both configured in Settings → AI Receptionist. Leave them empty for the default.
The person receiving the call gets a spoken briefing before they’re connected, along the lines of:
Hello [contact name], you have a transfer on your [business] line. [One or two sentences: who’s calling, what they need, key details.]
The briefing is built from a summary the AI writes during the call, and it deliberately excludes phone numbers — it’s context, not a data dump. Once it finishes, both parties are joined and the AI drops off.
When nobody answers
Section titled “When nobody answers”If the contact doesn’t pick up, is busy, or the call fails, the caller hears:
I’m sorry, we were unable to connect you. A team member will call you back shortly. Goodbye.
The call is then marked transfer failed in Calls. That promise of a callback is real work handed to you, so it’s worth watching for — a run of failed transfers means the transfer target is the wrong number or the wrong person.
Because the AI has already handed control to the phone network by that point, it cannot come back on the line and rescue the call. If you’d rather have a message than a dropped handoff, leave the transfer target unset: the AI will take a detailed message instead, which lands on the call in Calls and in the per-call email with the caller’s name, number, and what they wanted.
Voicemail is a different path
Section titled “Voicemail is a different path”Transfers are deliberate. Voicemail is the fallback for when the AI can’t run at all — if the receptionist fails to start, the caller is asked to leave a message of up to two minutes, which is recorded, transcribed, and sent to you, and the caller gets a missed-call text-back if you have one enabled.