An after-hours AI receptionist that sits behind your front desk

A mental health practice can't afford to drop two kinds of call: a new patient who finally picked up the phone, and a current patient with a question. It also gets robocalls. The job is to catch the first two when the desk is busy or closed, and to stop the third before it wastes anyone's time.

For a psychiatry practice we built it on two numbers. The main number plays a short phone menu that rings the front desk. When nobody at the desk picks up, or the office is closed, the call moves to a second number that holds the AI voice agent. We tried one number first, carrying both the menu and the agent, and the agent dropped offline. One HighLevel number can hold a phone menu or a voice agent, so the practice has run on two numbers since.

The menu doubles as the spam filter. Every caller presses 1 to be put through. It's a key press rather than a spoken "are you a person" question, so a patient gets through without a stilted exchange, and a robocall, which presses nothing, goes nowhere. A number that keeps calling without pressing anything gets blocked. HighLevel's Number Intelligence is switched on too, but on its own it only flags likely spam in the call log; it blocks nothing, which is why the block rule exists.

The agent is overflow. During office hours every call is routed through the menu to the desk first. The agent's greeting, its tone and the things it must refuse are written out in the plan before launch. It gives no clinical advice, never talks about medication, and never books into your EHR.

One part isn't solved, and we say so. On the live build, the desk's HighLevel desktop app has sometimes stayed silent while a call moved on to the agent, so a call staff could have taken went to the AI instead. The cause is still open. Until it's closed we don't describe the handoff as finished, and ringing on the desk's own computers is the first thing the QA report checks on any new build.