How do I train an AI receptionist?

There is no silent improvement period. An assistant does not work out how your business runs by being exposed to it.

That is the honest version, and it is also why the control sits with you rather than with a model somewhere.

The work is front-loaded. An hour to write, then twenty minutes a week for two weeks, then almost nothing.

First pass: hours, services, location, your five most common questions, and what should go to a person. An hour of writing.

Second pass, after three days: read every transcript, particularly the handovers. Each one is a question you did not answer, and most take twenty seconds to add.

Third pass, after two weeks: look at wording rather than content. Lines that made callers hesitate are usually written for the page rather than the ear.

Fourth pass, after a month: check nothing has gone stale. Prices, hours and staff names are the three that rot fastest.

After that it is maintenance, triggered by the business changing rather than by a calendar.

Say you run a dog daycare and you're three days in. You pull the transcripts that ended in a handover and find three worth fixing.

One caller asked whether you take puppies under four months. You add: "Puppies are welcome from 16 weeks, once they've had their second round of shots." Another asked about late pickup, so you write: "Pickup is by 6:30pm. After that it's $1 a minute, and we close the building at 7." A third asked whether you board cats, and the assistant rightly didn't guess. Your new line says: "We only take dogs. For cats, suggest they ask their vet for a recommendation."

Then there's one wording fix. Your brief said: "Vaccination records must be furnished prior to admission." The assistant repeated it faithfully and a caller replied, "Sorry, what?" You rewrite it as: "Bring your dog's shot records on the first day." The whole pass takes about fifteen minutes.

Every edit risks breaking something that used to work. Guard against that with a short list of test questions you keep forever: your hours on a holiday weekend, your most-quoted price, one question that must hand over, a booking request, and a request for a person. After each editing pass, call in and run all five. Ten minutes catches the new line that accidentally contradicts an old one.

Sort your handovers into two piles each week. One holds questions that should always reach a person, such as complaints or custom quotes. The other holds gaps, meaning things you'd happily answer if you'd thought of them. Once the gap pile is down to one or two a week, training is done and maintenance begins.

Prune as well as add. Every few months, search your transcripts for the topics in your brief. If nobody has asked about your 2024 holiday camp since January, delete the paragraph.

Keep dated copies of the brief, so that if calls get worse you can see what changed.

You write in plain language. There is no syntax to learn and no template to fill.

Changes apply to the next call rather than waiting for a training cycle, so an edit at ten o'clock is live at five past.

Transcripts and summaries arrive for every call, which is the feedback the whole loop runs on.