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An assistant is one configured voice agent. It has a greeting, a voice, a set of capabilities, and a knowledge base attached to it. A phone number points at exactly one assistant. Most practices run a single assistant on their main line. You need more than one when a line should behave differently: a Spanish-language line, a separate number for a specialty clinic, or a billing line that should never book appointments. Settings → Assistants.

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What you configure

The name the agent gives, and the first thing a caller hears. Keep the greeting short. Callers start talking over anything longer than a sentence or two.Say the practice name and offer help. Do not list options; the agent is not a phone tree, and listing options teaches callers to wait for a menu.
Voice, speaking rate, and how the agent handles interruptions. A caller can also ask the agent directly to slow down or speak up mid-call, and it will.
The toggles that decide what the agent can actually do: book, cancel, quote a balance, register a new patient, transfer. Each one is described in Capabilities.A capability that is off is not merely discouraged: the agent has no tool for it, so it cannot do it by accident.
Which knowledge bases this assistant can search when a caller asks a question about your practice.
The language the agent opens in. Callers can switch mid-call on a multilingual line.

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Changing an assistant

Changes take effect on the next call. There is no redeploy and no window where the number stops answering.
Changing an assistant changes what happens on live calls immediately. If you are making a substantial change to the greeting or to capabilities, do it outside your busiest hours and place a test call afterwards.

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Running more than one

When you add a second assistant, decide what makes it different before you copy the first one. Two assistants that differ only in name are a maintenance problem. A knowledge base update to one silently leaves the other stale. Good reasons for a second assistant:
  • A different language. Different greeting, different voice.
  • A different scope. A billing line with scheduling off, or an after-hours line that only takes messages.
  • A different location with materially different policies.
Not a good reason: a different phone number. Several numbers can point at the same assistant.