AI outbound calling

Let the AI voice agent ring new enquiries back — assignment rules, the per-lead hand-over, the calling window, attempt limits, and what happens when it gives up.

Besides answering the phone, the AI voice agent can call leads back. A web enquiry that arrives at 9pm gets a spoken callback the moment your calling window opens — the AI introduces itself, answers questions, and tries to book the appointment. Everything it does lands on the patient's timeline.

Outbound calling is part of the same agent configured on Settings → AI voice agent — see AI receptionist for setup, persona, tools and limits. This page covers how leads reach the AI and how it paces itself.

Which leads the AI calls

A lead is called only when it is AI-handled, which happens one of two ways:

An assignment rule matches — rules mark matching journeys automatically as they arrive or move.
Someone hands it over — the per-lead action on the journey itself.

AI-handled journeys show an AI badge on the journeys board and the patient page, and the Outbound queue card on the AI voice agent page lists every lead the AI currently holds with its attempt state. A queued lead that is holding rather than dialling says why beside its status — Waiting: outside the calling window, Waiting: daily minutes budget spent, Waiting: add-on off — and a parked lead says what a person needs to fix — Needs attention: no phone number on file, Needs attention: number outside the practice's country. Waiting reasons clear by themselves; needs-attention reasons come with a task for the lead's owner.

Assignment rules

Build rules in the Assignment rules card. Each rule has:

A trigger — New enquiry arrives, Journey enters a stage with the stage to watch, or A call is missed (see Missed calls below).
Conditions — all must hold: treatments, lead sources, locations, channels, and whether the enquiry was created outside opening hours. Leave a group empty to match any.
When the AI calls — Whenever the window allows, or Only while the practice is closed, which makes the AI a night-and-weekend closer that stands down when the team is in.
Opening hours to use — which site's hours decide "outside hours" and "practice closed" for this rule. The default is the practice's automation location.

Any matching enabled rule marks the journey; archiving a rule stops it matching new journeys without touching leads already queued.

Missed calls

A missed inbound call is the hottest lead signal a practice gets, so a rule can react to it. Choose the A call is missed trigger and pick the rule's actions:

AI calls back — the AI rings the caller back inside the calling window, exactly as it would a new enquiry. This needs the Agent live switch on. A caller who has opted out of phone contact is never handed to the AI in the first place — no queue row, no timeline entry.
Text back straight away — an SMS goes to the caller inside the practice's send window (the same one automations use, under Settings → Practice details), with the message you write on the rule. {{patient.firstName}} and {{practice.name}} fill in when it is sent. This needs the Text back missed calls switch on the Agent card — it is independent of Agent live, so texts still go out while the AI itself is paused.

A rule needs at least one of the two. The other conditions (treatments, lead sources, locations, channels, opening hours) work as for the journey triggers; for a missed call, "outside opening hours" is judged at the moment of the call.

What counts as missed: an inbound call on one of your Voice numbers that ended without anyone answering — unanswered, busy, failed, or bounced by a full voicemail box. Calls that reached voicemail and left a message count too. Only callers SmileLine can recognise, or who chose a new-patient keypad option, are followed up — an unknown caller who did neither keeps its Missed call notification and nothing else, so suppliers and spam stay out of the pipeline.

Two limits, so the same person is never chased twice:

The AI never calls back a lead it has already worked, or one that has been taken back from it, even years later. Only the text repeats.
At most one text per person per day, whatever they do. A missed call outside the send window waits for the next opening and sends then; a second one in the meantime sends nothing.

Missed-call texts are sent as replies to the caller's own contact — they respect an SMS opt-out but carry no marketing footer and apply no marketing-consent check, because the caller has just tried to reach you. A followup that cannot be completed automatically appears in Review with a Retry action; nothing is dropped silently.

Voicemail

When an outbound AI call reaches an answering machine, the AI hangs up without a word by default. Turn on Leave a message in the Voicemail card to have it wait for the beep and speak the message you write there, in the agent's language.

The AI leaves one confirmed message per lead: once a message has been spoken to the end, later attempts that reach a machine hang up as before. If a mailbox cuts the message off, or the confirmation never reaches us, the next attempt may leave the message again — so occasionally a lead hears it twice. Leaving a message costs no AI minutes; the retry ladder and the four-attempt lifetime are unchanged.

Hand a lead over — or take it back

On any active journey — the card menu on the journeys board, or the journey dialog — choose Hand to AI to queue it for calling, or Take back from AI to release it. A released lead is never dialled again unless someone hands it back.

The AI also steps aside on its own the moment a call is no longer wanted: when someone on the team makes first contact, when the journey is won or lost, and while a journey is snoozed. Archived patients are never called, and a lead without a diallable number is handed back to the team with a task instead of burning attempts.

The calling window

The Calling window card sets when outbound calls may be placed, in the practice timezone. The default is Monday to Saturday, 08:00–20:30. A lead that becomes due outside the window simply waits for it to open — after-hours enquiries collected overnight get their callbacks from the top of the next window.

Inbound answering is not affected — that follows each number's routing hours.

Calling across time zones. The window is evaluated in your timezone, and then the called party's own quiet hours are applied on top of it: an automated call is never placed before 08:00 or after 21:00 where the patient is. For a US number the patient's time zone comes from the area code (a code that straddles two zones is read as its larger one); a UK number is London time. A New York practice whose window opens at 08:00 therefore rings a California number at 11:00 Eastern at the earliest — the lead simply waits in the queue with Waiting: outside the patient's hours until then.

Attempt limits

The AI paces itself against two fixed budgets per phone number — not per enquiry, so a person who sends two enquiries is still rung as one person:

4 call attempts over the number's lifetime with your practice. This never resets — taking a lead back and handing it over again does not grant more calls.
2 attempts per day. An unanswered first attempt is retried about two hours later, inside the calling window; anything after that waits for the next calling-window day.

Only calls that actually rang count; a dial that failed before ringing is retried on its own short ladder and never spends the number's budget.

Answered calls end the chase: the AI books, captures what it learned, or transfers — the outcome is written to the journey, and the call's summary with any follow-up tasks lands on the timeline and Today exactly as for an answered inbound call (see AI receptionist).

When the AI gives up

When the final attempt goes unanswered, the lead is released back to the team: the AI badge clears from the current-handling state, the queue row shows Attempts used, and a priority follow-up task is created so a human picks the lead up rather than it going quiet. Nothing is closed or lost automatically — the journey stays exactly where it was on the board.

SmileLine's position, in plain terms: these callbacks are responses to the lead's own enquiry. The AI only calls people who asked the practice to get in touch — it never cold-calls, it introduces itself as an AI assistant at the start of every call, and it respects snoozes, archived records and the attempt limits above. Calls are placed inside the calling window you control.

Before any automated call is queued, the number has to pass a screening the AI never guesses at:

Consent evidence. A US practice's AI only calls a patient whose record carries consent to automated calls — where it came from and when. A UK or EU practice needs it too when its consent mode under Settings → Practice details is Explicit consent. Without it the lead is parked with a task for the owner: record the consent on the patient, or call them yourself.
Line type. Every number is looked up with the carrier first (mobile, landline or VoIP) and the result kept with the number.
Telephone Preference Service (UK). UK numbers are checked against the TPS through the checking service the practice subscribes to (set up by SmileLine for your account). A number on the register is never rung, and the queue row completes as Screened: on the do-not-call register with no task — the person has already answered the question.
Do-Not-Call list (US). US numbers are checked against the practice's own downloaded National Do-Not-Call list. Upload the list (one number per line, or the first field of each CSV line) through the API's POST /settings/ai-voice/dnc-imports; the raw upload is kept before it is read, and any line that does not read as a US number is counted and named in Review rather than dropped.

A lookup the carrier or the TPS service cannot answer is retried up to three times over 24 hours; after that the lead is parked visibly — a task for the owner and a Review entry whose Retry re-runs the lookup and puts the lead back in the queue. Nothing is dialled unscreened, and nothing is dropped silently.

The AI also stands down the moment the practice reaches the person another way: an answered inbound call, a booking (online or by the AI) or a reply sent from the inbox all count as first contact, and a queued lead completes as Contact made instead of being rung.

If someone asks not to be called

The AI acts on it during the call, rather than just saying so. If a lead asks to be left alone — or says you have the wrong number — the AI records that before it promises anything, and the effect is immediate and permanent:

The lead is released from AI calling for good. No later rule match or re-enrolment can put it back in the queue.
A priority task appears for the lead's owner, so a person can honour the request on your other channels too — email, SMS and campaigns are governed by each patient's marketing preferences, which the AI does not change on its own.
The request is written to the lead's timeline, so there is a record of what was asked and when.

This stance is under solicitor review ahead of launch and is not legal advice. If your practice records calls, the recording disclosure obligations described in call recording apply to AI calls too.