Set Up the AI After-Hours Receptionist

What the AI Receptionist Does

When a call comes in to your shop and nobody on your team picks up, the AI agent can answer instead of sending the caller to voicemail. It greets the caller, asks for what you tell it to collect (their phone number and what they need, at a minimum), and then hangs up and creates a draft job for you to review. You always call the customer back. The AI never promises work or quotes a price you did not set.

It runs on Telnyx, and the per-minute cost (about 5 cents a minute) is billed to you by Telnyx with no markup from KeyBolt.

Where to Find It

The AI agent is set up inside your call flow, not on its own page. Go to Settings > Phone & SMS, then open the Call flow tab. The AI settings appear in Step 3, "If nobody picks up...".

Turn On the AI Agent

1. Go to Settings > Phone & SMS > Call flow.
2. Scroll to Step 3, "If nobody picks up...".
3. You will see three choices: Voicemail, Forward to a different number, and AI agent. The AI agent choice starts locked until you set it up.
4. The AI agent settings panel opens right below the choices. Set the options you want (covered below).
5. Click Enable AI agent. KeyBolt creates the AI agent on your Telnyx account and links it to your shop. Once it is set up, the button changes to Save, the AI agent choice unlocks, and a green Live tag appears.
6. Click the AI agent choice in Step 3 so the AI is what answers when nobody picks up.

If you set up the AI but do not pick the AI agent choice, the AI is ready but not yet answering calls. Voicemail (or whatever you have picked) keeps running until you switch the choice to AI agent.

The Settings You Can Change

KeyBolt writes the actual conversation script for you so pricing and timing rules stay safe and consistent. You do not edit the script. You control these settings instead:

Bilingual

• English only. The AI speaks English.
• Auto-detect language. The AI listens and conducts the whole call in the caller's language (English, Spanish, French, German, Hindi, Russian, Portuguese, Japanese, Italian, or Dutch). Most shops with any non-English customers pick this.
• Press 1 for Spanish. The AI offers a press-1 menu to choose Spanish.

Daily AI Minutes Cap

This protects you from a surprise bill. Enter how many minutes of AI calling you will allow per day. The default is 100 minutes. At Telnyx's roughly 5-cents-a-minute rate that is about $5 a day. When the AI hits that many minutes in one day, new calls fall back to voicemail until midnight in your timezone, and the shop owner gets one heads-up. Each AI call also hard-stops at about 2 minutes on its own, so this cap is really there to catch a flood of short calls adding up. Most shops never reach it.

Use Shop Name in Greeting

When this is on, the caller hears "Hi, this is YourShop's assistant." When it is off, they hear "Hi, this is the shop's assistant." Turn it on if you want the AI to sound branded.

Send Follow-up Text After AI Hangs Up

When this is on, the caller's phone gets a short text once the AI call ends, so they know you have their details. You can edit the message. Two variables are available: the shop name and the problem the caller described. Keep it under 320 characters. Texting is part of Pro, the same line the AI uses.

Captured Fields

Pick what the AI tries to collect on the call. Two are always on and cannot be turned off: the caller's phone number and a description of the problem (without those the AI has no way to help you follow up). You can also add: vehicle make, vehicle model, vehicle year, callback preference, and detected language. Turn on the vehicle fields if you do a lot of car lockouts.

The Greeting Callers Hear First

The very first line every caller hears is the greeting set in Step 1, "A greeting plays," at the top of the Call flow tab. It defaults to a short recording-disclosure line. This plays before any ringing or AI handoff, so it is separate from the AI's own opening line. Edit it in Step 1 if you want a different opening.

Save and Push Changes

Click Save whenever you change an AI setting. If you ever see an amber "Pending updates" note on the AI panel, that means a setting changed but has not been pushed yet. Just click Save to push it.

Watch Your Telnyx Balance

The AI panel shows your live Telnyx balance, the one number Telnyx reports to us instantly. For your exact AI, voice, and text spend, open the Telnyx portal from the link on the panel. That is where the authoritative total lives.

After an AI Call

Every AI-handled call shows up in your inbox with the recording, the transcript, and the details the AI captured (phone number, what they need, and any extra fields you turned on). Review it and decide what to do: call the customer back, turn the draft into a real job, or send an estimate. You stay in control of every one.