#How a call goes

Read this before you send anybody their first code. It describes what happens at the other end — worth knowing, because you are probably the one who will be explaining it to the called person.

How a call goes — with a sample of how it sounds.

#At the scheduled time the telephone rings

The number calling is the one we run the service from. Nobody monitors the call live.

#The assistant introduces itself

Its first sentence says that it is automated. That is not politeness — it is required by Article 50 of Regulation (EU) 2024/1689 on artificial intelligence and cannot be switched off. Nor may you present the assistant as a human being.

Then it puts your questions, one after another, exactly as you wrote them.

#The called person answers in their own words

They do not choose from options and they need not answer everything. They may:

• refuse to answer an individual question,
• hang up at any time,
• ask to be rung later: the assistant agrees a time and calls again with only the questions it did not get to (see below),
• withdraw consent during the call, after which calling stops altogether.

None of it has to be justified to us.

#A call has a ceiling

A call cannot run indefinitely. As the permitted time draws to a close the assistant politely winds the conversation down; at the limit it ends either way.

If the call is silent from the start, the assistant greets first after a moment. If it goes silent for long in the middle, it ends the call.

#Callback

If the called person says "not now, call me in an hour" (or "tonight", "tomorrow"), the assistant agrees a time. When they give none, it offers the next scheduled call today, or otherwise in an hour. The call is recorded as "Postponed" and a Callback appears among the upcoming calls.

• It asks only the questions it did not get to.
• If a scheduled call falls close to the agreed time, the phone rings once and asks everything. The same question is asked once.
• Scheduled calls that would come earlier move into the callback.
• A call can be postponed three times in 24 hours at most; after that the schedule applies.

#Nobody picked up

Depending on how the call ended, it is tried again:

No retry rings between 9 pm and 7 am, and a retry never skips the next scheduled call, at most it joins it. Among the upcoming calls it shows as a Retry.

Calls that did not happen are not charged. Only a call somebody answered is paid for, from the moment it was answered.

#After the call

The audio becomes a transcript, and from the transcript an answer is extracted for each question in the type you asked for — together with the verbatim quotation of what the called person said.

The result appears in the application, usually within a few minutes of the call ending. See Reading the results.

#What the assistant will not do

• it will not assess health status or make a diagnosis,
• it will not recommend treatment or a change of medication,
• it will not warn you when an answer is "bad" — it knows no thresholds,
• it will not call outside the schedule because something is happening.

#Where the data travels

During the call, audio and text are processed by the voice interaction provider outside the European Union. It keeps nothing after the call. The full list of processors is in the list of sub-processors.