Capabilities and Knowledge

Decide what the AI Receptionist is allowed to do, choose the booking page it books on, and teach it what it needs to know about your business.

Capabilities

The Capabilities tab is where you decide what the receptionist is allowed to do on your behalf.

Answering questions is always on, and so is taking a message when it cannot finish something itself - they are what makes it a receptionist. What happens on a phone call it cannot finish is set on the Phone tab instead.

Capability	What it means
Book new appointments	Offer availability from your booking page and book new appointments, or send a booking link
Reschedule existing appointments	Look up the client’s upcoming appointments and move them, or send a reschedule link

The receptionist finds a client’s existing appointments from the phone number or email address they contact you from.

Booking in the conversation, or with a link

With Book new appointments on, a dropdown labeled When a client wants to book decides how it books:

Choice	What the receptionist does
Find a time and book it in the conversation	Offers open times, asks for whatever your booking page requires, and books it. It sends a link only if the client asks for one.
Ask whether to book it now or send them a booking link	Offers both - “I can book that for you, or text you a link so you can do it yourself” - and does whichever the client picks.
Send them a booking link to book it themselves	Sends the link as soon as they want to book, and never looks for a time itself. The booking page is where they pick one.

This is a setting, not a note. Writing “always send a link on the phone” in the receptionist notes does not change how it books - choose it here.

Whichever you pick, a page that cannot be booked in a conversation gets a link. The tab says so as soon as you pick the page - naming the page, and naming the reason:

• It verifies the client before booking
• It takes a payment
• The client picks which calendar to book on
• It only books people already in your address book
• It has more than two required questions beyond a name, phone, and email - and the warning lists them

Note

Verifying a mobile number is the one gate that does not always apply. A client who texts or calls from that number has already proved they control it, so the receptionist books them without asking for a code. Over email nothing proves the phone, so those bookings still get a link.

Capture Mode

Capture Mode is a checkbox under that dropdown, shown for the first two choices, and it is for a booking page that asks more than anyone will answer over text.

With it on, whenever the receptionist books in the conversation it takes a name, a phone number, and a time, and books the appointment right there. Then it sends the client a link back to your booking page, which opens on everything else the page asks - their time is already chosen, so there is no calendar to pick from, and anything you already know about them is filled in. The appointment sits on your calendar marked Tentative until they finish, and keeps its time whether or not they ever do. Nothing releases the slot.

If you let the client choose and they ask for the link instead, they get the whole booking page as usual. Capture Mode only changes what happens when the receptionist does the booking.

Capture Mode clears only the last reason in the table above, the one about required questions. A code at the door cannot be collected after the fact, so a page that verifies the client still gets a link.

On a booking page that takes a payment the checkbox is switched off and cannot be turned on. The card is collected as part of booking, so there is no way to hold the time first and ask afterwards.

Before it books, the receptionist checks that it can actually deliver that link. If it cannot, it takes a message instead of making an appointment nobody knows is unfinished:

What stops it	What the client is told
The number is a landline	It asks for a number that can receive a text
The number is on your stop list	Nobody in your office can clear that, so it takes a message
The number is on your own opt-out list	It asks permission to text them, and books once they agree

The message that carries the link is an ordinary message template using {{ booking.finish_link }}, so it is priced, checked against your opt-out lists at send time, and visible in your Inbox like anything else you send. On a phone call the link always goes to the caller’s phone; an email address spelled out loud goes wrong too often to rely on.

Asking again when nobody fills it in

That first link goes out the moment the appointment is made, and some people never tap it. To chase the ones who have not finished - and only those - add an auto message rule on the field booking.incomplete:

1. Go to Messaging > Appointment Auto Messages and click New Rule.
2. Choose Advanced, pick booking.incomplete from the field list, and leave the rule reading:

   booking.incomplete == true

3. Add a text or email message to the rule and put the link in it with Finish Booking > Link in the field picker, which writes {{ booking.finish_link }}. In an email, Finish Booking > Button gives you a button instead.
4. Set when it goes - a day after the appointment was booked, or a day or two before the appointment itself, or both.

booking.incomplete is true only while an appointment is still waiting on its form. It turns false the moment the client submits it, which is the same moment the appointment stops being Tentative, so nobody who has finished is asked again and nobody who booked on an ordinary page is asked at all.

Note

{{ booking.finish_link }} renders empty on an appointment that was not booked this way, so a message carrying it is only worth sending under this rule. Everything else about the message - the wording, the schedule, the channel - is yours, exactly like any other auto message.

Routing pages

If the page you pick is a routing page, the receptionist asks its questions the way the page asks them - using your own wording, your help text, and, for a dropdown, the exact choices your rules are written against, so “the Tigard one” lands on Tigard rather than on whatever words the client used.

Once the answers point at one location, the receptionist works for that location: it has the name and the address, and everything the client asks next is about that one.

Confirming and cancelling are not on this list

When a conversation is about a specific appointment, the receptionist can also confirm it, cancel it, or flag it as needing to be rescheduled - and those are not controlled by the checkboxes above.

They follow your message settings instead, exactly as they do when a client replies “1” or “2” to a reminder. A client answering your reminder in their own words gets the same outcome as a client who replies with a number:

The receptionist can	When
Confirm the appointment	Your messages let clients confirm
Cancel the appointment	Your messages let clients cancel, and it is before your cancellation cutoff
Flag it for rescheduling	Your messages let clients request a reschedule, and Reschedule existing appointments above is off

If your settings do not allow one of these, the receptionist does not do it. It tells the client the office will follow up and takes a message for you instead, with their name, a way to reach them, and what they wanted.

You set what clients are allowed to do, and the cutoff, under Advanced Settings on your auto message.

Note

This works on phone calls too. If someone calls the number you messaged them from within the last 30 days and their appointment has not already passed, the receptionist recognizes which appointment they are calling about and can confirm or cancel it the same way.

Caution

The receptionist never deletes anything from your calendar. Cancelling marks the appointment cancelled and notifies you, the same as a client cancelling by text.

Booking page for new appointments

Choose the booking page the receptionist uses when a client books a new appointment. Availability, the questions it asks, and the booking itself all come from that page. Pages are listed by name, with the page’s link name in parentheses so you can tell two similarly named pages apart.

Until you pick one, the receptionist cannot book new appointments no matter what is ticked above. It still does everything else you have turned on, and the tab shows a reminder under the dropdown while it is empty.

Rescheduling does not use this setting. An existing appointment is moved through its own booking page, exactly like the reschedule links in your reminders.

Tip

Keep the booking page you point it at simple. If the page takes payment, asks the client to choose a calendar, restricts who can book, or verifies the client first, the receptionist sends a booking link instead of booking inside the conversation. A long list of required questions does the same - unless you turn on Capture Mode, which is there for exactly that page.

Knowledge

The Knowledge tab is what the receptionist knows. Each field is labeled with how far its reach goes: This receptionist only, or Shared with every AI agent on this account.

Receptionist notes

Guidance just for the receptionist, on top of your business knowledge: how to greet people, what to say about walk-ins, when to hand off to a person, anything about tone. This one is not shared with your other agents.

Whether it books in the conversation or sends a link is not something to put here - that is the When a client wants to book choice on the Capabilities tab.

Business name

What the receptionist calls your business when it talks about you, on every channel. Leave it blank to use your account’s company name.

Set this if the receptionist answers for one location, or for a trading name that is not the name on your account.

Business knowledge

Facts about your business: hours, address, parking, policies, fees, what you do and do not offer. For example:

We are open M-F 8am-5pm. $50 no-show fee. 24-hour cancellation notice required. Park behind the building.

This field is shared with every AI agent on your account. Editing it also changes what your other AI agents say.

Read my website

You do not have to write it all by hand. Type your website address in the box above the business knowledge and click Read my website. Apptoto reads your site, which takes up to a minute, then fills in the business knowledge from what it found and adds suggested approved answers to the list below.

Look over what it wrote before you keep it. Nothing is saved until you click Save, and Undo puts the business knowledge and the suggested answers back the way they were.

Approved answers

Questions clients ask, paired with the answer you want sent. The receptionist treats these as the source of truth and uses your wording rather than composing its own.

Use approved answers for the questions where the exact wording matters - pricing, insurance, whether you take new clients, what to bring to a first visit.

Tip

Write your business knowledge as plain facts and your approved answers as complete sentences you would be happy to see sent word for word. Then use Try It Out to ask the questions your clients actually ask, and fill in whatever it gets wrong.