Voice and calling

SmileLine Voice is the practice's phone system, inside the CRM. Calls ring in the browser, land on the patient's timeline, and require no handset, PBX or carrier account of your own — though a number can also ring a physical desk phone directly if you want one.

Open Settings → Voice & calling to provision calling, turn call recording on or off, and see which devices are registered. Managers and owners can open the page; everyone with calling permission can enable calling on their own device.

What is included

Voice is a paid add-on:

• £199/month for GBP practices or $249/month for USD practices, including three concurrent lines and one phone number per line.
• £49/month or $69/month per additional line, up to 30 lines. Each line includes one number.
• £5/month or $7/month per extra number beyond the ones your lines include.
• Unlimited fair-use calls to domestic destinations — there is no per-minute charge and no call meter.
• The Power Dialer is built in: if a practice enables Voice while paying for the standalone Power Dialer add-on, the add-on is removed from the subscription in the same change, so it is never billed twice.

A "line" is one call in progress. Three lines means three people can be on the phone at the same time; a fourth simultaneous call goes to voicemail rather than being turned away.

Enable Voice

Only the practice owner can change billing.

Lowering the line count takes effect on the subscription straight away — unless the practice holds more numbers than the lower count allows (each line includes one number, plus at most 15 billable extras), in which case the change is refused and the message says how many numbers to release first. Raising it makes the extra capacity available as soon as billing confirms the change, so add lines before the campaign day rather than during it.

Provision calling

On Settings → Voice & calling, the Calling card shows the practice's provisioning state. Calls are carried on a calling platform SmileLine owns and operates — there is no provider account to open and no API key to paste.

A practice that has never provisioned reads Pending. Click Verify & provision: SmileLine checks the calling platform is reachable and marks the practice's calling ready, and the badge then reads Active. Nothing is created at the carrier, so repeating it is safe and never creates anything twice. If the badge reads Error, the message names what failed; click the button again, and get in touch if it keeps failing.

Numbers cannot be ordered or ported while the badge reads Pending or Error, so run this before going to the numbers page. Verifying again later is a connection check, not a repeat of setup.

You still need at least one active Voice line — a number whose role is the phone system — before anyone can dial or receive calls. Click Manage numbers, or see Phone numbers, which lists every number the practice holds and what each one is used for.

Call recording

Turn Record calls on to record answered calls for training and dispute resolution. Recordings are stored against the call and follow the practice's retention window. When recording is on, every caller hears a short recording notice automatically before the conversation starts — on inbound calls, on Power Dialer calls, and on calls the AI receptionist answers — so nobody on the team has to say it.

Only owners and managers can play a recording or read a transcript. People who place calls — front desk and telesales — cannot. Voicemail is different: anyone who can take calls can play messages in Voicemail.

Enable calling on a device

Each person turns calling on for each device they use, once. It has to be a deliberate click: browsers only allow a page to play call audio and use the microphone in response to a real interaction.

From then on that device rings for inbound calls and can place calls. The Calling devices card on this page lists every registered device for the practice; a manager can revoke one — the next call simply will not ring there.

Removing someone from the practice, or moving them to a role without calling permission, revokes their devices automatically.

One tab at a time

A browser registers each device once, however many Smileline tabs are open. The first tab to enable calling takes the calls; every other tab shows Calling is active in another tab with a Take over button. Taking over moves calling to that tab unless the other tab is ringing or on a call, in which case it says so and keeps the call. Closing the tab that has calling hands it to the next open one automatically.

While you are on a call

The call bar shows who you are speaking to and offers Mute, Hold, a Keypad for phone menus, Transfer and End call. A caller on hold hears music, not silence.

Transfer lists every colleague who has calling set up, with their do-not-disturb state, and takes a typed number too. A colleague who is already on a call cannot be chosen — their device would not ring. Two ways to hand the call over:

• Announce first (the default) rings the colleague while the caller hears hold music, and connects you to the colleague as soon as they answer. Tell them who is calling, then click Complete to hand the caller over, or Cancel to take the caller back. If the colleague does not answer within the number's ring time, the caller comes back to you.
• Blind moves the caller to the colleague's own device — the one they used most recently — at once, and leaves yours.

On an inbound call, Send to voicemail plays the caller your voicemail greeting and lets them leave a message; the call still shows as answered in the call log.

When a call that was ringing you is answered by someone else, the screen pop closes with Taken by and their name, so you know it is being handled.

The calling pill's menu also holds Do not disturb (your devices stop ringing until you switch it back) and, on browsers that allow it, a Speaker picker for where call audio plays.

Turning calling off on a device

Open the menu on the calling pill and choose Turn off calling on this device. The device stops ringing at once, on every tab, and stays off until you turn it on again from the same pill. A device a manager revoked from the Calling devices card stays off until a manager restores it there — the pill explains which of the two applies.

Your call log

Settings → Phone → Call log lists every call in and out of the practice with its recording and transcript, exactly as the Desk app's Calls view does. Open a call to add an Outcome (any short label — "Booked", "Callback", "Wrong number") and a Note; click the value, type, and press Enter (Ctrl or ⌘ + Enter in the note). Both stay on the call for anyone who opens it. Patient records, the inbox and the pipeline show a call button beside every phone number; it dials from the device you are on, and hides while that device is already on a call.

Next steps