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 and flagging conversations for you are always on - 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 a new appointment decides how a booking happens:

Choice	What happens
Find a time and book the appointment	The receptionist offers open times, asks for whatever your booking page requires, and books it. A link goes out only if the client asks for one.
Offer the client a link or a booking, and follow their choice	”I can book that for you, or text you a link so you can do it yourself.” Whichever the client picks is what happens.
Find a time, and then send a link for them to finish booking	The receptionist helps the client land on a time, then sends a link with that time already selected. The appointment itself is always made on the booking page.
Always just send a link	The link goes out as soon as the client wants to book. The receptionist does not look up open times at all; the page shows the client everything that is free.

Some booking pages can only be finished in a browser: ones that take payment, let the client choose a calendar, or ask more than a couple of extra questions. Clients always get a link for those, whichever choice you pick.

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 flags the conversation for you instead.

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, requires a verification step, or asks more than a couple of questions beyond name, phone, and email, the receptionist sends the client a booking link instead of booking inside the conversation.

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.

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.