Can an AI receptionist send text messages?

The appeal is obvious. Addresses, booking confirmations and links are all easier to read than to hear.

The legal shape is different, though. An inbound call happens because the customer chose to call you; a message goes out because you decided to send it.

That distinction is the one most of this category gets wrong, and it is worth keeping straight before you build a process around messaging.

GreetKeeper answers calls placed to your business. The TCPA framework and the FCC's February 2024 artificial-voice ruling address calls and messages a business sends out.

Text messages to consumers fall on the outbound side of that line, with consent and opt-out obligations attached.

A caller who calls you and asks for something in writing has arguably invited it, and that is a question for your own counsel rather than for a marketing page.

None of that makes messaging unlawful. It makes it a separate decision with its own rules, rather than a free extension of answering the phone.

A text to your own staff is a different thing again. When the assistant texts your on-call person with a caller's details, it is alerting someone inside your business rather than messaging a consumer.

Say you run a physical therapy clinic. Existing patients signed an intake form that includes consent to appointment texts, and your scheduling software already sends those reminders. For them, nothing changes. A booking made by phone at 7pm lands in the calendar, and the software you already use sends its usual confirmation.

New callers are the open question, because no form exists yet. One workable approach uses the call itself. You write the questions the assistant asks, so add one at the end of a booking: "Is it OK if the office texts a confirmation to this number?" Her yes, or her no, is in the transcript with a timestamp.

In the morning your front desk sends the confirmation from the clinic's own system to the people who agreed. Ask your counsel whether that record is enough for the texts you send. Appointment messages and marketing messages are treated differently, and marketing texts generally need written consent, which a spoken yes isn't.

Start with whether the number can receive a text at all. Caller ID from a landline or an office switchboard looks like any other number, and a text sent to it disappears. Having the assistant ask "Is this a cell phone?" before the consent question avoids that.

Registration is the second check. US carriers require businesses that send texts through software from ordinary ten-digit numbers to register their brand and their message type, a scheme known as A2P 10DLC. Unregistered traffic gets filtered or blocked. If your scheduling tool or CRM texts on your behalf, ask the vendor whether registration was completed for your business.

Opt-outs have to work. Reply STOP to one of your own messages and confirm that you stop getting them, then check that your system shows the opt-out on the contact.

As for what GreetKeeper itself sends: it texts your team, such as the on-call person, with a caller's details. We make no claim about texts to the caller, so plan on your own system sending those.

GreetKeeper does not place outbound calls, which is deliberate and keeps the product on the inbound side of that legal line.

Every call produces a transcript and a summary with the caller's number, so following up by whatever channel you use is straightforward.

It texts the on-call person with the caller's details when a call meets the rule you set, so an emergency at 2am reaches a phone rather than an inbox.