Product · Phone

Voice calling and SMS

Your own numbers, calls answered in the browser, routing by hour and day, and every call transcribed onto the guest conversation.

What it is

Your organization gets its own phone numbers. Guests call and text them, staff answer in the browser, and every call and message lands on the same guest conversation as their WhatsApp and their email — not in a separate phone system nobody reads.

Calls can be recorded, are transcribed, and the transcript is filed as an internal note on the conversation. Nobody has to write up what a call was about, and the next person to pick the guest up can read it.

Setting up a number

Numbers live under Settings → Phone numbers. Availability and the paperwork differ by country — some require a local address or a registered business — so tell us which country you need and we handle the registration.
  1. 1

    Get a number for the country you operate in

    One organization can hold several: a local number per market reads as local to the guest, and is far more likely to be answered.
  2. 2

    Choose who it rings

    The routing mode decides whether a call rings the browser, forwards to a phone, or follows a schedule. See below.
  3. 3

    Decide on recording and transcription

    Two independent switches, so you can transcribe every call without keeping any audio.
  4. 4

    Sign in to take calls

    Anyone signed in with the app open is a possible destination for a browser call — no separate softphone to install.

Who rings, and when

Three presets cover most teams. Reach for custom rules only when your on-call shape genuinely needs them.
Always ring the browser
Ring whoever is signed in, around the clock, then fall back to your fallback number.
Always forward
Straight to a phone, every hour of every day.
Business hours
Inside working hours ring the browser and then forward; outside them, forward immediately.
Custom rules
Your own windows, when the presets do not fit.

Windows are evaluated in your organization’s own time zone, and the first one that contains “now” wins. A window may run across several days, so Friday 17:00 until Monday 08:00 is a single rule rather than three fiddly ones. If no rule matches, the call falls back to ringing the browser and then forwarding; if nobody is signed in, it goes to the forward leg immediately rather than ringing out.

Every call records why it went where it went

The routing decision is stored with the call as a sentence naming the rule that matched and what it did. When somebody asks why the phone did not ring, that is the answer, not a guess.

Calls and texts in the inbox

An inbound call or text is matched to the organization by the number it came in on, then to a conversation by the caller's number — the guest's, or a partner's.
  • Texts are ordinary messages. They appear as bubbles in the conversation alongside every other channel, and staff send them from the same composer.
  • Calls appear as a call record on the conversation, with the transcript attached to it.
  • An unknown number still lands somewhere. It is filed against the organization that owns the number that was dialled, so it is in front of a person rather than lost.

Recording and transcription

Recording and transcription are deliberately separate switches. Turning transcription on without recording gives you the written record and deletes the audio once the transcript exists — which is what most teams actually want, and a much easier conversation with your data protection officer.

The transcript is filed as an internal note on the guest conversation, linked to the call it came from. It is internal: guests never see it. Check the rules where you and your guests are — several jurisdictions require you to announce that a call is being recorded.

Live calls

How a call is connected decides what can be done to it while it is running, so the choice is worth understanding before you need it.
Direct bridge (default)
The carrier connects the browser straight to the guest. One hop, the lowest latency, and the audio never passes through us.
Conference
Every participant joins a room. This is the only shape that allows a third person, so it is what listening in, whispering and taking over need — at the cost of one carrier leg per participant.

The trade-off

A direct-bridged call cannot be listened to or joined, and its recording only arrives once the call ends. That is not a missing feature — it is the consequence of the audio never reaching our servers. Put a number on conference mode if supervision matters more than the extra leg.

On a conference call, a supervisor joins muted and cannot hang up the call they are listening to, and a running transcript builds while the call is still in progress rather than after it.

Limits worth knowing

  • Number availability is a country-by-country matter. So are the rules for sending SMS: some countries require registration of the sender before a message will be delivered at all. Ask us before you promise a customer a number in a new market.
  • Listening in requires conference mode, set on the number before the call, not during it.
  • Browser calling needs the tab open and microphone permission granted. A number with nobody signed in falls through to its forward leg, which is why a fallback number is worth setting even on a browser-first setup.