Our idea. Copied since.
Roughly 6 in 10 people who can’t reach you dial the next shop on the list. They don’t leave a voicemail. They don’t call back. You never find out it happened.
AI text-back answers for you. Miss the call, or take one at 9pm, and it texts them straight back, works out what broke, and books the job on your calendar — while you’re under a machine or asleep.
No credit card. Included with a Business Line. Turn it off any time.
An auto-reply sends one message and stops, and the customer still has to ring you in the morning — by which time they’ve called someone else. This holds the whole conversation: one question at a time, remembering what it’s been told, ending with a call on your board.
It asks like a dispatcher would, because it was written by one. Which appliance. What it’s doing. Where you are. Then it offers the times you actually have.
How the phone line works →Every one of these is enforced in the software, not just requested of the model. That distinction matters: a rule you only ask an AI to follow is a suggestion.
It may only quote openings handed to it from your calendar. Stating a date it wasn’t given is blocked in code. A customer once waited in for a window an earlier version made up — that can’t happen now.
Two appliances at one address become two calls, but only if the day has room for both. If it doesn’t, it stops and alerts you rather than promising someone a slot you’d have to cancel.
Reply to that customer yourself and the AI goes quiet for them until your shop opens again. It never talks over you mid-conversation.
Business hours, Saturdays and Sundays are separate switches. Sundays are off unless you turn them on. It knows when your shop is shut because you told it, not because it guessed.
Don’t want it booking at all? Put it in gather-only and it collects the appliance, fault, name and address, then hands you a ready-to-book call. No slots offered.
Someone who actually rang you gets answered even outside the rules that hold back ordinary texts. They tried to reach you — that’s the whole point.
An AI voice receptionist picks up and makes your customer have a conversation with a machine. The research on that is not close: 79% of Americans would rather deal with a human than an AI, and only 8% actively prefer the AI. In the trades that number walks — they hang up and call the shop that answers.
Texting sidesteps the whole problem. Nobody has to talk to anything. It arrives as a normal message, they answer it whenever they like, and the tone of the exchange is the one they were already having with their plumber and their kid’s school.
Answering-service pricing above is their own published entry pricing, and the per-minute rate is where it actually bites: a 50-minute plan is about sixteen three-minute calls. Setup fees of $0–$500 and after-hours premiums are common on top. Ours has no per-minute charge because it isn’t a phone call.
Almost 20 years in the trade. The calls that hurt weren’t the ones I quoted and lost — they were the ones I never knew about. Somebody rang at 7pm, got voicemail, and called the next shop. There was nothing on the phone in the morning to tell me it had happened.
Nobody sold anything that fixed it. Answering services cost more than the jobs were worth and didn’t know a compressor from a control board. Every “AI receptionist” wanted to put a robot on the phone with my customer. So I built the thing I actually wanted: a text conversation that finds out what broke and puts the job on the board.
It was booking calls for my own shop long before it was sold to anybody else’s, and it was booking calls for my own shop before it was ever sold to anybody else’s. It has been copied since. That’s fine — it means it was the right idea. It just wasn’t their idea, and they’re still running it on a product that doesn’t know what a tech sheet is.
Free to start, no card, no contract. If it books you one extra call it has paid for itself several times over.