Turn on your own AI Receptionist
Outcomes
Three parts make a receptionist
Every AI Employee, including the AI Receptionist, is built from the same core parts. These three elements comprise every AI Employee in the platform, and configuring yours means deciding who it is (its purpose), what it can do (its capabilities), and what it knows (its knowledge). Flip each one:
Configure yours
Your receptionist serves your business, so it lives in your workspace: Partner Center. There, open AI → AI Workforce and click Configure on the AI Chat Receptionist.
It works well out of the box. Give it a name and an image that fit your brand, and it will introduce itself accordingly. The Capture Lead Information capability is on by default: it asks visitors for contact details such as a name, phone number, or email, and saves captured leads to your CRM. Turn on Book Appointments and connect your calendar, set up in CRM → My Meetings, and the receptionist offers real meeting times and collects the booking details itself. This guide covers each setting.
Give it knowledge, sparingly
Knowledge is chosen, not dumped. Add your own website as a source in Follow links mode, which learns up to 100 pages from the URL you give it (the site must be publicly reachable without a login), and enable Automatic refresh so it re-crawls monthly on its own. Business facts that live nowhere on your site (hours, services, what makes you different) go in as plain text or file uploads.
Then stop. Less is more with AI knowledge: a lean, current set of sources keeps answers consistent, and you can add more the moment a real conversation shows a gap. The Knowledge Base guide covers every source type.
Put it on your website
The widget does not add itself to your site; installing the code is what makes the receptionist real. Your receptionist's widget lives at Conversations → Settings, on the Web Chat card, behind Manage widgets: open the System widget (the built-in receptionist widget) to set its messages and appearance to match your brand, then choose Embed from the row's ⋮ menu to copy the installation code. The code installs on any site that lets you add code to the page head, with specific routes for WordPress, GoDaddy, and Google Tag Manager. The floating widget is the strong default: it travels with the visitor down every page. This guide covers widgets and embed codes.
This is the exact setup you will later repeat for clients from their Business App.
Put it through its paces
Configuration ends where testing begins. Click Chat on the receptionist's card to open a test conversation (an incognito window gives every test a fresh start), and ask it what your customers ask you: services, hours, prices, something ambiguous, a meeting request. Watch whether it gives too much, too little, or exactly enough; each response carries a clickable Explanation showing the reasoning and the knowledge source behind it. Change one thing at a time (its purpose, a capability, or a knowledge source) and ask again. If your receptionist also answers a phone line through the AI Voice Receptionist, call the number and run the same questions out loud.
Experimenting here is safe by design: the configuration includes a reset to default when you want to start over.
Open AI → AI Workforce, click Chat on your receptionist, and ask it the three questions your customers ask you most. Tune one thing it gets wrong, and ask again.
Everything deeper (voice configuration, custom capabilities, and building receptionists for clients in their Business App) has a path of its own: Hire your first AI Employee.
Knowledge Check
Three quick questions on the three parts, knowledge choices, and getting the widget live.