What Ava can do

Ava is your practice assistant, and she works in three places. | | | | --- | --- | | On the phone | She answers your practice line as Front desk | | In the consulting room | She listens to a visit and writes it up | | Beside you in Practor | Out loud from the top bar, or in writing under **Messages** | ## Talk to Ava, or write to her Two ways to reach her, and they're different things. **Talk to Ava** is the button in the top bar, on every screen. Pressing it opens your microphone and you speak to her. The button says where the conversation has got to: **Listening…**, **Processing…**, **Ava is speaking**. Press it again to end. To type instead, open **Messages**. Ava sits at the top of the list, above your team's own threads, and that conversation stays there to scroll back through.  Either way, ask her to find something or to do something, and she asks you to confirm before she changes anything. ## Ava sits in on a consultation Press **Start Ava** on a live encounter and she records the visit. When you end it she writes what she heard onto the encounter, and you accept or decline each entry she made. [Let Ava write up a consultation](/help/ava/record-a-consultation) covers it. ## On the phone Callers talk to her normally, there are no menus to press through, and she works in your real calendar. ### What Ava can finish herself | | | | --- | --- | | Book an appointment | Cancel an appointment | | Move an appointment | Register a new patient | | Check a patient's cover | | Anything else becomes a message or a transfer. ### Ava checks with the caller first Ava reads the details back and asks the caller to confirm. She won't book, move, cancel, register anyone or check cover until they do. A confirmation covers that one call and those exact details. If anything changes after the caller agrees, Ava asks again. Confirmations run out after a minute and a half, so a call that drops halfway through doesn't leave a booking behind. ### Transfers Ava hands over when a caller asks for a person, and when she can't finish what they need. A transfer rings the people you've given permission to take front desk calls, and only those of them who are online at that moment. Ring time is yours to set and starts at 30 seconds. If none of them is online, Ava doesn't ring anyone. She takes a message instead, so a caller never listens to a phone nobody can answer. ### Callbacks A message Ava takes becomes a callback for your team, with the reason and how soon the caller needs it. [Review the calls Ava took](/help/ava/review-the-calls-ava-took) has where they queue up and how to clear one. ### Outside business hours Outside the hours you set, Ava greets callers with your after-hours greeting instead of the standard one. **After hours: messages only** also stops her transferring at those times, so an out-of-hours caller gets a message taken rather than a colleague's phone ringing at home. She still books. ### Calls Ava won't take Ava turns a call away for six reasons, checked in this order: 1. The **Emergency kill switch** is on. 2. The number is one you've blocked. 3. The call is from a country you haven't allowed. 4. That caller has already called ten times this hour. 5. The day's call-minute cap is reached. It starts at two hours. 6. More than thirty different numbers have called this hour, which is what a nuisance run looks like. Those calls appear in your list as **Blocked**. The last three clear on their own, so a patient turned away by the fourth can ring back in an hour. ## What Ava won't do Ava doesn't give clinical advice, discuss results, or read anything from a patient's record aloud. ## Review calls Every call gets one of ten outcomes: **Completed** for a call that needed nothing done, or **Booked**, **Rescheduled**, **Cancelled**, **Registered**, **Message taken**, **Transferred**, **Abandoned**, **Blocked** or **Failed**. [Review the calls Ava took](/help/ava/review-the-calls-ava-took) has where to read them and what else each call carries. ## Related - [Turn on Front desk](/help/ava/turn-on-front-desk) - [Review the calls Ava took](/help/ava/review-the-calls-ava-took) - [Set up your practice](/help/getting-started/set-up-your-practice) - [Turn on online booking](/help/scheduling/turn-on-online-booking)