What the assistant can and cannot answer
Allowed topics, blocked topics, tone, and the handover that happens when it is unsure.
The assistant answers from what you configure — your hours, your services, your FAQ, your availability. It does not give clinical advice, and it is not a medical device.
Two lists
- Allowed topics — what it may discuss freely.
- Blocked topics — what it must decline and deflect, whatever the patient asks.
A blocked topic is not a silence. The assistant declines and moves the patient towards a person, which is a better outcome than an answer you did not authorise.
Example
A sensible starting pair
- Allowed — opening hours, location and parking, which specialties exist, what a first visit involves, how to book, how to cancel.
- Blocked — diagnosis, whether a symptom is serious, medication and dosage, guarantees of outcome, anything about another patient.
Handover
When a conversation moves past what it can answer, it hands the patient to your team rather than inventing something plausible. That behaviour is on by default and we would encourage you to leave it there.
A handed-over conversation appears in the inbox marked as waiting for a human, and — if you have the notification on — emails whoever is meant to pick it up.
A confident wrong answer about a treatment costs more than a slow right one. Every dial here is safe to make more cautious.
Tone
| Register | Reads as |
|---|---|
| Formal | Careful and correct. Suits surgery and anything high-stakes. |
| Friendly | Approachable without being casual. The safe default. |
| Warm | Softer, more reassuring. Suits paediatrics, veterinary, aesthetics. |
| Concise | Short answers, few words. Suits a clinic whose patients want facts. |
This is the baseline register. Custom flows and locked answers override it where you need specific wording.
Risk scenarios
On top of the topic lists you can define scenarios with their own severity:
| Severity | Behaviour |
|---|---|
| Hard stop | The assistant stops and sends the exact response you wrote. Nothing is generated. |
| Warn | It proceeds but flags the conversation for you. |
| Log only | It proceeds normally and records the match, so you can see how often it happens. |
Start a new scenario as log only for a week. You find out how often it really fires, and on what, before you decide what it should do.
Common questions
- Can it answer a question I never anticipated?
- Within your allowed topics, yes — that is the point of it. Outside them, it declines and hands over.
- How do I find out what it is getting wrong?
- Read the inbox. Every handover is a question it could not answer, and most of them are one FAQ entry away from being answerable.