AI receptionist
Let the practice's AI voice agent answer calls in natural conversation — book appointments, capture new enquiries, transfer to the team, and cover the hours nobody is at the desk.
The AI voice agent answers the practice's phone in a natural spoken conversation. It can check availability and book appointments, take a new caller's details and open a journey, answer questions from your knowledge base, and hand the call to a human whenever that is the right thing to do.
Open Settings → AI voice agent to manage it. The page needs the owner or manager role.
What you need
- SmileLine Voice — the AI answers on the practice's SmileLine numbers, so Voice and calling must be provisioned with at least one active number.
- The AI voice agent add-on — enabled by the practice owner under Settings → Billing (it sits under SmileLine Voice there). It costs £99 or $129 a month including the first 300 AI minutes of each billing month, then £0.35 or $0.45 a minute — see Billing. Until it's on, this page tells you which of the two prerequisites is missing and links you to Billing.
With both in place, click Set up the AI agent. That provisions the practice's agent with a sensible default persona; nothing answers or dials until you route a number to it or create an assignment rule.
The agent always introduces itself as an AI assistant at the start of a call. Callers are never left guessing whether they spoke to a person.
Answer calls with the AI
Which calls the AI answers is decided per number on Call routing. For each number, set While open and While closed independently:
- AI agent while closed only — the classic after-hours receptionist: the team answers during the day, the AI answers evenings and weekends.
- AI agent both — the AI answers everything and transfers when needed.
- Leave a number on Ring a group and the AI never touches it.
Every AI routing choice carries a fallback — a ring group or voicemail — under If the AI can't take it. The call goes there whenever the AI is unavailable: the daily minutes budget is spent, all its concurrent calls are busy, or the add-on has lapsed. Anything broken fails towards voicemail, never towards a dropped call.
The Agent live switch on the AI voice agent page pauses everything at once: routed calls fall through to each number's fallback and outbound calling stops.
Persona
The Persona card decides who callers hear. One persona covers both directions — the receptionist answering at 9pm and the callback at 8am sound like the same person.
- Name, Voice and Language (English or Italian). New agents start with Iris, a friendly, upbeat support voice; enter another provider voice ID to change it.
- Inbound greeting — the first thing a caller hears.
- Different after-hours greeting — switch it on to acknowledge the practice is closed ("…the practice is closed right now, but I can still book you in"). Off, callers hear the inbound greeting whatever the time.
- Outbound opener — how the AI opens when it calls a lead back (see AI outbound calling).
- Instructions — standing facts and tone for every call: the treatments you focus on, parking, how to talk about pricing.
- Inbound notes and Outbound notes — extra guidance that applies to one direction only, such as how to handle emergencies when answering.
Tools
The Tools card controls what the agent may actually do:
- Book appointments — check availability and book directly, using the same engine as online booking.
- Capture leads — take a caller's name and contact details mid-call and open a journey on the board, exactly like a website enquiry. Set a default treatment alongside it: callers describe what they want in their own words ("I chipped a tooth", "just a checkup"), and when that matches none of your configured treatments the default is what keeps the enquiry on the board instead of leaving a contact with no journey.
- Transfer to a human — hand the call over when the caller asks, is in pain, or the AI gets stuck. Choose which ring group the transfer rings, or leave it on everyone with calling enabled.
- Answer from the knowledge base — ground answers in the same knowledge base the chat widget uses: prices, opening hours, policies.
At least one of booking, transfer or lead capture must stay on, so every call can end usefully.
Limits
The Limits card caps what the agent can spend:
- Concurrent AI calls (1–5) — how many calls the AI may hold at once, further bounded by the practice's free lines.
- Daily minutes budget — once spent, inbound calls take the fallback and outbound calling waits for tomorrow.
- Max minutes per call — the AI wraps the call up politely at the limit.
Missed-call text-backs and the outbound voicemail message have their own switches on this page — see AI outbound calling.
Test it without a phone
Click Test the agent to chat with the composed persona in text form — same instructions, greetings and tools, no call involved. Flip the direction selector to rehearse it answering the practice or calling a lead back. Tool use shows under each reply ("Checking availability…"), so you can see what it would have done.
The public phone demo on smileline.io is separate from your practice's agent. Pick UK or US next to the number field (or type the number with +44 or +1); a UK number works with or without its leading 0. Its live page shows a four-digit verification code before the phone rings. A premium British voice reads the prompt. Enter that code when the call asks for it. If you miss or mistype it, the call gives you three attempts in total. The AI connection prepares while the verification prompt plays, but it can neither join nor speak until the code succeeds. Each number can receive up to 20 test calls per UTC day, whether or not the code was entered correctly. A wrong or missing code after the third attempt ends only that call; you can try again immediately until the daily allowance is spent. The page explains when the limit is reached and retries become available after midnight UTC. The demo never reads or changes your practice setup.
Transcripts and recordings
Every AI call lands on the patient's timeline like any other call. The conversation is transcribed as it happens and stored as the call's transcript. If Record calls is on under Voice and calling, the audio is recorded and kept for the practice's recording retention window.
Playing recordings and reading transcripts needs the recordings permission — owners and managers have it; coordinators and telesales do not.