Voice phone assistant
Fertiligent includes an automated voice agent that can answer your clinic's phone line and handle common caller requests before, or instead of, routing to staff. This page covers what it does and how it fits into your day-to-day workflow.
What it handles
- General conversation. It greets callers naturally and can answer everyday, conversational questions, following the thread of the conversation from one question to the next.
- Clinic-information questions. It can answer questions like phone number, email, address, hours, and services from a curated knowledge base you provide for your clinic.
- Referral status lookups. A caller can ask about the status of their referral. Once verified (see below), the agent shares a safe, high-level status rather than raw record details.
- Messages and callbacks. If a request needs a person, or the caller simply wants a call back, the agent takes a callback number, reads it back to confirm, and queues it for staff to action. When the caller answers "Is there anything else I can help you with?" with no, the agent says goodbye and ends the call.
- Escalation. For anything outside what it's built to handle, the agent hands off cleanly rather than guessing, leaving a message or callback request for staff. If your clinic turns on automatic transfer, it can also ring your front desk during the hours you set.
When the agent finishes speaking, it gives the caller a moment to answer before deciding it didn't hear them, so callers rarely hear "I'm sorry, I didn't quite catch that" while they are drawing breath to reply. A caller who stays silent is still prompted.
Verifying who's calling
Before sharing anything about a referral, the agent confirms the caller's identity, typically by date of birth, which the caller can either say aloud or enter on the phone's keypad. It only shares status information after this check succeeds.
If the caller is calling from a phone number already on file, the agent may recognize them and streamline the check, a caller who has already verified isn't asked for their date of birth again. If the number isn't recognized, or the date of birth doesn't match, the agent doesn't share private details: it offers another way forward (such as keying in a different number to look up) instead of getting stuck or guessing at who it's speaking to.
A check carried over from an earlier call or text is re-confirmed against your records each time it is relied on. If the patient's chart has since been removed or deactivated, the number is no longer on it, the referral no longer matches, or the number now also belongs to a different patient, the earlier check no longer counts and the caller is asked to verify again.
Failed attempts are limited, and the limit follows the caller. After repeated failures the caller is locked out of verification for 24 hours. Hanging up and calling back does not give them a fresh set of attempts, a change from earlier behaviour, where the count reset with each new call.
Where the caller is already recognised but has not consented to receive personal health information, the agent says so at the start, without first asking for a date of birth. See Consent & patient privacy.
What it can do for a verified patient
Once the caller's identity is verified and consent is on file, the agent can also:
- Look up their upcoming appointments and the status of recent results.
- Confirm an appointment, or take a request to cancel or reschedule one.
- Book a nurse intake call on the spot, the one action it completes rather than drafting. The referral moves to Intake booked and stays in progress until the physician consultation is booked, and a linked partner is added to the same appointment (see Partners booked together). See Intake nurse availability.
- Update a contact detail, or collect a missing referral detail.
- Text the caller public information they ask for, such as an address or how to prepare for a visit. Public material only, and capped per call so a conversation can't turn into a stream of texts.
- Share a summary of their own care, including current medications and recent labs.
For anything that touches a patient's record or the calendar (a reschedule, a contact-detail change, a missing referral field) the agent records a request or draft for your staff to review and apply. It never edits the record or moves the calendar on its own. Booking a nurse intake call is the one exception, and it is confirmed on the spot.
Appointment times are never guessed
The agent only offers times it can state unambiguously in your clinic's timezone, and refuses a time it can't, rather than reading it out in a zone the caller didn't expect. It also never offers or commits a slot that has already passed, and it books against the specific slot it offered, so a long conversation can't end with the caller booked into a different time than the one they agreed to.
If your clinic only takes nurse intake bookings, the agent can be set to stop offering physician consultations altogether, instead of mentioning a service you don't book.
Approved wording on calls
When your clinic's approved replies are set to Strict, everything a caller hears is wording your clinic has approved, including the short pauses:
- While the caller waits for an answer, the only thing they hear is the fixed line "One moment." The assistant no longer fills the pause with a short acknowledgement written from the caller's own words, because that was not approved wording. If the caller only said something like "okay, thanks", they hear no waiting line at all. (At Free, the short acknowledgement is unchanged.)
- The hand-off line is said once. When the caller asks something the approved wording doesn't cover, they hear your clinic's hand-off line and the request goes to your team. If they then ask something else that isn't covered, they hear a shorter second line instead of the same promise again: "I've added that to your message for our care team. Is there anything else I can help with?" Their words join the same item for your team, and no second callback is promised. If the first hand-off couldn't be raised, the caller was told nothing, so the next uncovered question hears the first line again.
- A clear "No" ends the call straight away. When the caller answers "Is there anything else?" with "No" or "Thank you", the closing line is said at once, without a pause first.
Both lines can be reworded under Settings, Approved Replies tab, Answering when there is no approved reply: Nothing further to offer (phone call) is the first line and Already passed to the care team (phone call) is the second. Eva works the same way on your website and has her own copy of each, marked (Eva avatar).
For Strict calls, Fertiligent can also switch on a faster answer to fact-card questions: when a caller's question is plainly one fact card's question ("What are your hours?"), the card's own approved text is spoken straight away. It is off by default, runs first in a review-only mode that changes nothing the caller hears, and is turned on per clinic only after that review. Any question that isn't clearly one card's question is answered exactly as before.
Suspected medical emergencies
If a caller describes something that may be a medical emergency, or asks whether their symptoms warrant an emergency room, the agent recognises it before the conversation reaches the AI model, tells the caller to call 911, and stays on the line rather than hanging up on them.
This is deliberately separate from other kinds of escalation: a caller raising a legal or complaint matter is never told to call 911, and a suspected emergency is never answered with an ordinary "someone will call you back." Nor is it put through to your front desk by automatic transfer: the caller is told to call 911, and nothing rings for the rest of that call.
If the caller raises an emergency again later in the same call, they hear a short reminder instead of the whole message again: "If this is an emergency, please hang up and call 9-1-1, or go to the nearest emergency department."
Collecting missing details
During a referral call, the agent may notice a detail is missing, for example an email address, and offer to collect it from the caller. Anything collected this way is never written to the record automatically: it's saved as a draft for a staff member to review and apply. A person always stays in the loop.
When your team already has the conversation
If somebody on your team has claimed the caller's conversation, for example by texting them, the assistant does not handle the call. The caller hears that the care team is looking after their request and will call back, a callback is queued, and the call ends. See Claiming a conversation pauses the assistant.
Putting a caller through to staff
When the assistant escalates a call that is still in progress, a staff member can Take over from Conversations and the caller is put through to their phone. The caller hears a short hold message and hold music while it rings. The person who answers hears that the call comes from the clinic's phone assistant, then is connected. If nobody answers, the line is busy, or a voicemail box picks up, the caller is told the care team will call back and the call ends politely; a caller is never put through to a voicemail box. What the caller and your team member say after the hand-off is added to the call's transcript. See Taking over a live call.
When the caller only asks for a person, the hand-off line is said straight away, with no pause first.
Automatic transfer during clinic hours
Your clinic can have an escalated call ring a phone by itself, without waiting for someone to press Take over. It is off by default. An administrator turns it on under Settings, Phone Line tab, Taking over a live call:
- Fallback number for take-overs and automatic transfer: the number that rings, for example the front desk. Automatic transfer can't be turned on without it.
- Ring the fallback number automatically: on.
- Transfer days (Monday to Friday, Monday to Saturday, or every day), and Transfer hours start and Transfer hours end, in the clinic's local time. Calls are put through up to, but not including, the end time. The tab shows which time zone the hours are read in. Public holidays are not skipped, so turn it off on a day the clinic is closed.
During those hours, when a caller asks for a person or the assistant can't help them, the assistant says "Let me put you through to someone on our team." The caller hears a short hold message and hold music while the fallback number rings. The phone that rings shows the assistant's number as the caller ID.
- Someone answers: they hear "This is a call from the clinic's phone assistant" and a short reason (for example, the caller asked for someone), then are connected to the caller.
- The phone system isn't sure a person picked up, for example after a long greeting such as "Good afternoon, front desk, this is ...": the person who answered is asked, in English, to press 1, and the caller is joined only once they do. A front desk that answers with a full greeting will hear this on most transferred calls, so let them know.
- Nobody answers within about 25 seconds, the line is busy, or voicemail picks up: the caller is told the care team will call them back on the number they are calling from, and can key in a different number, which is read back and saved as the callback number. Then the call ends. A caller is never put through to a voicemail box.
- The transfer can't start: the assistant says "I'm sorry, I couldn't put you through right now." and takes a callback request as usual.
Some calls are never put through: a caller who described a possible medical emergency (they are told to call 911), a referring office, and a call the safety check ends straight away. One transfer is tried per call, and outside the hours you set, callers hear the callback message as before.
Either way, the conversation stays in Conversations for follow-up, unclaimed, and its record says what happened. When the front desk answers, the worklist shows a notice: check with whoever answered before calling the patient back. While a transfer is ringing, Take over doesn't claim the call, and says it is being put through by automatic transfer.
To stop automatic transfer, turn the setting off. It takes effect on the next call.
Where calls are reviewed
Every conversation the assistant handles is logged in the portal under Conversations, and it's not only phone calls. Voice, text, portal and email conversations appear together in one worklist, each tagged with its channel, so your team works from a single view instead of one inbox per channel.
From there your team opens a conversation for its transcript and outcome, resolves it once it's handled, and picks up anything the assistant escalated. See Conversations.
For how a collected detail or callback surfaces against a referral, see Referrals workflow.
Availability
The phone assistant is enabled per clinic, on a phone line set up for your clinic; individual capabilities, such as booking a nurse intake call or recognising a caller who verified recently, are switched on separately. Ask your Fertiligent contact about enabling it. Automatic transfer during clinic hours is off for every clinic until an administrator turns it on under Settings, Phone Line.