Set up the AI phone assistant

The phone assistant answers calls with the same knowledge as your website assistant: your boats, live availability and prices, hours, policies, service menu and your Knowledge & chat answers. It can check a date, text or email a booking link, create a service request and take a message. You keep your shop number and your phone company. Settings → Phone assistant walks you through four steps.

1. Choose how it answers

• After hours and missed calls (recommended). Your phone rings first like always; if nobody picks up, or you're closed, the assistant answers. Works with any phone. You can add a cell number for real emergencies, like a boat in trouble on the water.
• Screen every call. The assistant answers first and sends callers who need a person to another phone, usually your cell. It can't be your main shop number, because calls to that number go to the assistant.

2. Get the assistant's number. It's a behind-the-scenes number. Callers never see it.

3. Send your calls to it. Pick your phone company and you'll see the exact steps: a short code for most cell phones (Verizon `*71`, AT&T and T-Mobile `**004*1`), your online account for Spectrum, Comcast and Cox, or call-flow settings in apps like Quo and RingCentral. If you get stuck, call your phone company and ask for "conditional call forwarding" to the assistant's number.

4. Make a test call from a different phone. The page shows "It worked" as soon as the assistant answers.

After each call you get an email summary, and the call (summary, transcript and recording) is listed on the page and linked to the customer when the number matches. If it couldn't answer something, add the answer under Knowledge & chat; it's used on the next call.

It never takes card numbers or makes bookings itself; callers book online from the link it sends. In an emergency it tells callers to call 911 first.