Meet Amy: how your AI front desk works

Amy is your AI front desk. She picks up every call and text your practice gets, day or night, and handles it the way a great receptionist would — greeting the caller by your practice name, booking or moving an appointment, verifying insurance, and passing anything that truly needs a person straight to your team. The difference is that Amy never misses a call, never goes to lunch, and remembers every patient she's ever spoken with.

What Amy does on every call

When a patient calls, Amy is listening for what they need and acting on it in real time. On a typical call she can:

• Answer and greet with your practice name and the greeting you set.
• Book an appointment into a real opening in your schedule, matched to the right provider, visit type, and length.
• Reschedule or cancel an existing appointment and free the slot for someone else.
• Verify insurance the moment she has a member ID and date of birth, and post the benefits breakdown to the patient's chart.
• Answer common questions about hours, location, parking, forms, and the policies you gave her in Settings.
• Take a message and capture exactly what the caller needs when a human should handle it.

She does the same across text messages, so a patient who prefers to book by text gets the same service as one who calls.

Where a human takes over

Amy is built to know her limits. Anything she shouldn't decide on her own doesn't get guessed at — it lands in What needs to get done (your Tasks tab) with the full context, so your team can pick it up fast. Common hand-offs include:

• A clinical or treatment question — Amy never answers these. She offers to book the patient with the provider instead.
• An upset or urgent caller who should reach a person right away.
• A billing dispute or anything about money that needs a human decision.
• A request that falls outside the rules you set, so nothing happens without your say-so.

You control a lot of this yourself. See Customizing Amy's greeting and escalation rules to set exactly what always reaches a person.

Amy remembers every patient

Every call, text, and note lives on the patient's timeline, and Amy reads it before she speaks. So a returning patient doesn't start from scratch — she already knows who they see, what they came in for last time, and how they like to be reached. This is the part that gets better the longer you use Valian: each conversation makes the next one smoother. Your team sees the same history in the patient's timeline and memory.

What Amy will never do

A few hard lines keep your practice safe:

• No clinical advice, diagnosis, or prescriptions. Those always route to a provider.
• No promising coverage or payment. She reads benefits; she doesn't guarantee them.
• No guessing. If she isn't sure, she captures the request and hands it to your team rather than inventing an answer.

Frequently asked questions

Is Amy a real person? No. Amy is Valian's AI front desk. She sounds natural and handles the routine work of a receptionist, but she's software — which is why she can answer every call at once and never take a day off.

Can patients tell they're talking to AI? Mostly they just notice the phone always gets answered. Amy greets callers with your practice name and the greeting you chose, and she's happy to hand off to your team whenever a person is the right answer.

Does Amy work after hours and on weekends? Yes. She answers around the clock. What she does after hours follows the hours and rules you set — see Setting your hours, holidays and greeting.

What if Amy can't handle something? Then she doesn't try to fake it. She captures the details and drops a task into What needs to get done so a human on your team can finish it.

How do I change how Amy behaves? Everything Amy does is editable for the life of your account in Settings — your hours, service menu, greeting, booking rules, and what always escalates to a person.