How an AI receptionist works: one call, start to finish.

Every call starts with your name and the AI and recording notice

“Thanks for calling Ridgeline Plumbing. You’re speaking with an AI assistant, and this call is recorded. What’s going on?”

• Your business name comes first, then the notice. You can’t switch the notice off.
• If you edit your greeting and remove the AI or recording notice, Wakeman puts it back automatically.
• If a call’s record doesn’t show the notice was said, we delete that call’s recording and transcript.
• Recording and AI laws vary by state. Have your own lawyer approve the wording and how calls are handled before you go live.

It asks the question your trade needs, not a generic “how can I help?”

“There’s water coming out from under my water heater.” → “Okay. First — is the water anywhere near an outlet, a panel, or a light fixture?”

• It worked out this is a plumbing job, not heating, even though the caller said “heater”. That mix-up is how a generic answering service sends the wrong tech.
• Job: water heater, active leak. Urgency: same night, because water is moving.
• The next question is about safety, not booking. Order matters.
• Everything you tell us about your trade, services, the work you don’t do and your house rules goes into one set of instructions the AI follows. It isn’t a fixed script per trade.

It listens for danger words the whole time the caller is talking

“Stop. If you smell gas, leave the building right now. Don’t use any light switches, phones or appliances inside. Call 911 and your gas utility from outside.”

• How it spots danger: it checks what the caller says, during the call, for set words — gas, carbon monoxide, smoke or fire, water near electrics, major flooding, sewage. These are fixed rules, not an AI guess.
• Once a call is marked an emergency, nothing later un-marks it. It alerts your on-call phone straight away (the owner’s phone if nobody is on call), and the call stays on your list of calls to review.
• A caller who describes it in other words may only be marked urgent. Urgent calls, like an ordinary leak or no heat, text your on-call phone right away, day or night.
• The AI is told to say the safety script, but we can’t force it to say it word for word. We are still testing how fast the alert arrives on every phone setup, so it is a safety net, not a replacement for 911.

The address is where most AI receptionists fail

“1425 Southwest Barbur Boulevard, apartment 3B”

• It learns the street names from jobs you’ve already booked through Wakeman, so it hears them right. Your ZIP codes are used to check the address is in your area.
• It asks for the address in one go, not street, then city, then ZIP. Field by field feels like a phone menu and makes the call twice as long.
• It checks the address with the postal service during the call. The postal record said this building needs a unit number, which is why it asked for 3B.
• If it still isn’t sure of the address, it asks for a cross street, and can text the caller a link to confirm it. Not every caller taps it.

Your fee, your open times, your on-call list

“Ridgeline’s after-hours rate is a $189 emergency dispatch fee, and that gets a licensed tech to your door tonight. Is that okay?”

• It’s told never to quote repair prices, replacements, warranties, insurance or financing, or to compare you with other companies, and only to mention the call-out fees you switch on. Nothing can physically stop the AI saying something else, which is why every call is recorded for you to check.
• Booking is off at the start: it takes the job down for you to confirm. When you switch booking on, it only offers times you’ve marked open in Wakeman that aren’t already booked. It does not look at your Jobber calendar.
• It says “let me check who’s on call” before it looks, not after. Silence of more than about seven-tenths of a second sounds like a dropped call.
• If the caller says “hold on, let me get my husband”, it waits up to ninety seconds and comes back with “I’m still here”. It never starts the greeting again.

After the call, you can see what was sent and whether it arrived

“Emergency booked — water heater leak. Tonight 12:15–1:15 AM, Marcus R. $189 trip fee agreed.”

• After a booking, it texts the caller the details, and texts the tech the job is assigned to (or you, if no tech is set) the address and the job. Your dashboard shows whether each text arrived.
• If Jobber is connected, it creates the customer, the property and the job there too, and shows you if that failed. Otherwise the booking stays in Wakeman. Housecall Pro is not generally available yet.
• Every call is sorted for you to review, and you can download your call list as a spreadsheet.
• Wakeman doesn’t claim to build a ready-made pack for disputing Google ad charges. The call list shows you which ones are worth questioning.

If your phone company’s voicemail picks up before the call is forwarded, Wakeman never gets the call. We can’t check that from here, so call your business number from another phone and let it ring.

Set your phone to forward only the calls you don’t answer. Don’t set it to ring your phone and Wakeman at the same time; some phone systems get that wrong.

Your number stays with your phone company. Forwarding is something you switch on with them, and you can switch it off the same way.

One runs the voice (listening, speaking and taking turns), another works out what the call means and does the booking, and a phone company carries the call itself. Any one of them can have an outage.

Booked jobs can go into Jobber after a call; Housecall Pro is not generally available yet. Wakeman doesn’t read your Jobber calendar; it offers the times you set in Wakeman, and a job can still fail to reach Jobber or clash with one already there.

Recording and AI laws vary by state. Have your own lawyer approve the wording and how calls are handled before you go live. The full policy is on the call recording page.