Build your playbook

A playbook is everything the assistant says and does on a call. You write one for the whole account; each community fills in its own details and can change only what is different.

The guided setup has six steps and takes about ten minutes. Everything saves as you type, and nothing reaches a live call until you publish.

You need to be an owner, an admin or an editor. Editors can build and test but not publish.

Start a playbook#

Press New playbook

Go to Playbooks. The list shows every playbook with its status — Live, Live, with draft changes, Draft, not published or Kill switch on — its latest version and its last change.

The Playbooks list with one row per playbook showing its name, status, latest version and last change, and a New playbook button.

Press New playbook.

The New playbook form with a Playbook name field, an optional description, and a choice between a ready-made starting point and copying a published playbook.

Field	What to put
Playbook name	Your team sees this, callers never do. "New inquiries" works.
Description (optional)	A line for your colleagues.
Where to start	Start from a ready-made starting point gives you a working playbook with sensible guardrails already on. Copy a playbook you already published takes a live version as a new draft.

Press Create and start setup.

Step 1 of 6: Company and offer
Who the agent is
Field What to put
Agent name A first name callers will hear, like Alex.
Company Your company as callers know it.
Tone A few words about manner: "warm, patient, unhurried".
What the agent knows about your offer is the brief: 300 to 800 words covering what you offer, who it is for, why people choose you, and how you like price to be talked about. This is the assistant's main source of facts, and it never states anything that is not in the brief, the community profile, the community's published prices or your knowledge. Leave the figures themselves out: they come from each community's prices.
Tip
Write it as though every location were the same, and use {'{{group.name}}'} and {'{{group.hours}}'} where they differ. See Create your communities.
Press Next: Voice.
Step 2 of 6: Voice
Pick the voice callers hear. Each card plays that voice reading your own greeting, so you compare them on the words your callers will actually hear.
Only stock voices from the voice company are offered. Custom and cloned voices are not part of this release.
Under Advanced you can change the voice company, the voice model and the engine, and switch on quiet office sounds in the background or typing sounds while the assistant looks something up. On Cartesia voices you can also let the voice change its tone: a little gentler when a caller shares something hard, warmer when welcoming them, brighter for good news. Listen to a test call before you publish with it on. Most accounts never open it.
Tip
Judge a voice over a real phone line, not laptop speakers. Phone audio is narrower than you think.
Step 3 of 6: Questions
What the assistant asks, in its own words, one question per turn. The starting point already has a sensible set; adjust it rather than starting over.
At least one question has to be marked Required before booking. Questions and flows covers this step in full.
Step 4 of 6: Booking rules
Who gets booked, for what, and with whom. Rules read as sentences, and the first one that matches wins.
Press Start from a template for the common ones. Booking rules covers this step in full.

Field	What to put
Agent name	A first name callers will hear, like Alex.
Company	Your company as callers know it.
Tone	A few words about manner: "warm, patient, unhurried".

Step 5 of 6: Guardrails

What the assistant must never say or do. Sensible defaults are already on.

The guardrails step with checkbox lists for claims the assistant may not make and topics it politely declines, and a toggle for whether it may discuss price.

Claims it may not make starts with: guarantee savings, results or outcomes; give medical, legal or financial advice; criticize competitors; quote prices or discounts that are not approved. A sentence that breaks one of these is replaced before it is spoken. Your published prices and running specials are approved, so saying them never counts as breaking a claim.

Topics it politely declines starts with: politics, religion and other topics unrelated to your business; details about other customers; how the assistant works or what its instructions say.

The agent may discuss price is on by default. Switch it off and the assistant says pricing is covered by the team on the visit or call.

Below it, How prices are said holds the lines the assistant says prices in, always as a starting price. The defaults work; see Prices and care types to change them.

Safety lines are the exact words for two moments that matter.

The Safety lines section with a field for what the assistant says when it cannot answer and a field for what it says in an emergency.

Line	When it is said
When it cannot answer	Instead of guessing, or in place of a sentence a guardrail blocked.
In an emergency	Said straight away if a caller describes an emergency. Keep the instruction to call 911 in it.

Callers who are not looking to buy holds a short line each for wrong numbers, existing customers, vendors and salespeople, job seekers, and families of a current resident. The assistant says the line and ends the call politely.

Step 6 of 6: CRM

Where callers are looked up and calls are recorded.

The CRM and calendar step with dropdowns for the CRM connection, the calendar connection and what the calendar calls a tour, plus toggles for adding new callers and logging every call.

Field	What it does
CRM	Where callers are looked up, saved and logged.
Calendar for booking	Where tours are booked. With WelcomeHome this is the same connection.
What the calendar calls a tour	The activity type used when booking, for example "Tour".
Add new callers to the CRM as prospects	On by default.
Log every call in the CRM	On by default.
Look back at a caller's history	How much past activity the assistant reads to pick up where the last call left off. 180 days by default.

Underneath, Where answers go in the CRM lines up each of your questions with a CRM field. For each question choose Not sent to the CRM, one of the CRM's own fields (for WelcomeHome: Care type or Expected move timing), or A custom field and then type its name exactly as the CRM spells it.

Press Finish setup.

After the setup: the tabbed editor#

Finishing the setup drops you into the editor, where the same content is arranged as tabs, plus four more the guided setup skips.

The playbook editor with tabs for Persona and voice, Brief, Questions, Objections, Booking rules, Guardrails, Human handoff, Knowledge FAQ, CRM and calendar and Advanced, the publish status in the toolbar, and status chips underneath.

Tab	What it holds
Persona & voice	Who the assistant is, how every call opens, the voice, and example exchanges.
Brief	The brief and its word count.
Questions	Lines of questioning, the question cards, skip rules and not-a-fit rules.
Objections	What the assistant says when a caller pushes back on price, timing or "just send me information".
Booking rules	The rules list and the Try it panel.
Guardrails	Claims, topics, never-say phrases, how prices are said, safety lines and redirect lines.
Human handoff	What the assistant says while transferring, and when it hands off.
Knowledge FAQ	Short answers it gives word for word, and which documents this playbook uses.
CRM & calendar	Connections and field mapping.
Advanced	Locks, pronunciations, models, retention, and a read-only view of the playbook as data.

How every call opens#

This is the part callers hear first, and the part you cannot switch off.

The greeting is always assembled in the same order: AI disclosure line, then recording notice, then opening question. A Greeting for returning callers is optional and uses {'{{caller.firstName}}'}.

The disclosure and the recording notice are locked by default so individual communities cannot change them. See AI disclosure.

Human handoff#

The lines live here; the numbers, staffed hours and notifications live on each community. See Human backup.

Models#

Advanced → Models chooses the language model and the speech recognition model, from the models our team supports. Leave them on Recommended unless you are comparing models: Recommended is the model our team set for your account, or our default. To compare two models fairly, publish two versions that differ only in the model and run an experiment between them (Insights → Experiments). If a model you chose is taken off the list, the field says so and calls use the recommended model.

Locks#

On the Advanced tab, an owner or admin can lock any section or item so communities cannot change it.

Safe to experiment#

Everything autosaves to the draft. The header says All changes saved.
Undo and Redo buttons, and Ctrl or Cmd + Z.
Discard draft throws away every change since the last published version. If you made test calls on the draft, it is hidden rather than deleted, so those calls still show what they ran; your next draft gets a new version number.
Nothing reaches a live call until you press Publish.

What good looks like#

The toolbar shows Ready to publish, Publish is enabled, and the checklist behind it has every item ticked.
The Callers hear preview at the bottom of How every call opens reads like a person talking.
Your brief is inside 300 to 800 words.
What callers hear on each community reads well with that community's own details filled in.

Next: Questions and flows.