Never miss a business call
A number pointed at Connect is answered on every call, at any hour, by either the turn-based carrier path or the realtime speech path a workspace opts into. The caller gets a conversation grounded in your Knowledge; a transcript and a summary land on the call record; and whatever could not be settled becomes a follow-up carrying a reason, rather than a call nobody remembers.
What happens to a call nobody would have answered#
The carrier hands the call to Connect and the workspace is resolved from the number it arrived on.
Result The call exists as a record from that moment, so a call that fails ten seconds later still leaves evidence.
Connect greets and listens. On the realtime path the caller can interrupt; barge-in is ignored for the first couple of seconds so a cough does not cut the greeting in half.
Result The conversation is grounded in Knowledge, and what Knowledge does not carry is not improvised.
Anything Connect may not settle alone — a price, a commitment, an escalation phrase — stops there.
Result The item appears in Needs You for a person, ranked rather than filed chronologically.
The call ends. A transcript and a summary are written to the record, and any promise made becomes a dated follow-up with a reason.
Result
runner.chase_phonedrains phone follow-ups two per tick through the same gates as any outbound call.
What has to be in place first#
| Thing | Why it matters | Where it lives |
|---|---|---|
| A number linked to the carrier trunk | Without it the call never reaches Connect | Carrier console, then the Phone screen |
| Voice autonomy | Decides whether Connect speaks freely, asks first, or only prepares | What Connect May Do |
| Knowledge for the questions you actually get | Ungrounded answers are refused, so thin Knowledge shows up as a quiet, unhelpful call | Knowledge |
| A follow-up policy | Decides what a promise on a call turns into | Follow-ups |
| Somebody watching Needs You | Line health escalates into it, and so does every held decision | Needs You |
The realtime speech path is something a workspace opts into rather than a default. Both paths answer; they differ in how the turn is taken and in what a reply costs.
What the caller does not get#
Three limits do more to shape this use case than any setting.
- An instant reply
- The floor on the realtime path is the model first token plus its end-of-turn detection. The best measured call had a 3.3 s median reply; the target used in tuning is 2.5 s and anything past 4 s is treated as slow. A caller who expects the clipped rhythm of a human receptionist notices this.
- A recording to replay
- Call recording is foundation: the capability is asked of the provider rather than assumed, and it is not enabled on the live carrier. What exists is the transcript and the summary, which answer most of what a recording would have been used for and none of what an audio archive is used for.
- A finished hand-over to a colleague
- An escalation phrase queues a transfer and the supervisor panel can act on a live call, but a completed warm transfer is not available. In practice the dependable route to a person is a phone follow-up, which is placed under the same gates and is visible until it is done.
Where the cost lands#
On the realtime path the bill is audio tokens, in and out, and audio is metered at several times the rate of text. Length is therefore the whole cost story: a call has a thirty-minute ceiling, and the difference between a two-minute and a nine-minute call is roughly the difference in what it costs. Every call is priced and charged, and a call the remaining budget cannot cover is stopped rather than run into an overdraft.
Prompt size is the other lever, and it is not free. Instructions of around 7,500 characters produced a first token in 1.2–1.8 s; at 9,600 characters the same measurement was 2.3–3.4 s. A long persona is paid for on every single turn of every call.
When it goes wrong#
- The line answers in silence
- The call connected but no first token arrived. A watchdog sits above the first token for this reason. The call record still exists, which is how a silent failure is found at all rather than being an absence in a report.
- Calls are not arriving
- The number may not be linked to the trunk, which is a carrier-console action rather than anything in Connect.
line_healthescalates a line that is not ready into Needs You, and a phone follow-up against a line that is not ready is retried in an hour instead of being burned. - Connect would not answer a question
- Almost always Knowledge, not the model. A claim Knowledge does not support is refused on purpose; the refusal is recorded in the decision log, which is the fastest way to find the gap.
- A price was discussed
- On the carrier path a price that Knowledge cannot support is refused. On the realtime path the same rule can only live in the instructions, so a breach is *detected* rather than prevented —
price_spokencounts the lines the voice priced, using the same expression the carrier path checks each sentence with.
Questions#
Can I listen back to a call?
No. Recording is foundation and is not enabled on the live carrier, so there is no audio file to play. Each call carries a transcript and a written summary instead, both attached to the call record and to the person the call resolved to, and both searchable in a way audio never was.
How quickly does Connect reply on a live call?
The best measured call had a 3.3 s median reply, and that is a floor rather than a target to beat with configuration: it is the model first token plus its end-of-turn detection. Tuning aims at 2.5 s and treats anything beyond 4 s as slow. Claims of one to two seconds do not match what was measured here.
What happens if the caller asks for a human?
The escalation is recognised, the transfer is queued and the supervisor panel can act on the live call, but the completed hand-over depends on a provider capability that is not enabled. The reliable outcome is a phone follow-up with the caller number and the reason, drained by chase_phone and visible in the queue until a person closes it.
Does this work outside office hours?
Yes — the call is answered the same way at any hour. What changes out of hours is what Connect may promise and who is there to act on Needs You, which is the subject of the after-hours page.