Assistants: create and tune your assistant

The Assistants tab lists your assistants over four columns: name, type, attached phone number and status. An assistant with no line shows No number assigned.

The Create an assistant button asks for a name, nothing more: everything else is set afterwards.

The menu on each row lets you rename, duplicate or delete. Deleting always asks for confirmation, and the message changes when a number is attached: that number will be released and will stop ringing.

An assistant page is split into Essential and Advanced. Essential covers 90 percent of needs; Advanced keeps only two specialist settings.

Within Essential, capabilities sit in two blocks. The first holds what everyone uses: General, Appointments, Notifications and Texts to your clients. The second, Advanced capabilities, holds Call transfer.

Nothing gets lost along the way: the page uses automatic saving. There is no Save button, a discreet indicator confirms the save, and a banner appears if a save failed.

This is where the first impression is made. Pick the language first, because it drives the list of voices: French, English, Spanish, German.

The catalogue holds 91 native voices, each one listened to and approved individually. Every voice has a first name, a portrait, a character word such as Reassuring or Energetic. Clicking the portrait plays a sample. Quebec voices sit with the French ones and are labelled as such.

The way of addressing customers chooses between formal and informal address: that setting genuinely changes how your assistant speaks. The tone itself is set in the Knowledge page, Your rules section.

Your assistant’s first words are written by Tinos: it says its first name and your company name, states that it is an artificial intelligence and that the call is recorded, then invites the caller to speak. The first name is changed in the Name field of the assistant page, your company name in Profile, from the account menu.

Apart from the first name and your company name, this greeting is fixed: it contains the AI disclosure and the recording notice required by EU rules, and Tinos guarantees them on every call.

• Second language: from the Team plan, your assistant switches mid-call when the caller speaks the other language or asks for it. You also pick its voice.
• Speech rate: three steps, Calm, Normal or Brisk. To hear it, start a test call.

A single panel still lives here; two former settings have moved, and here is where to find them.

Rules no longer live in the assistant page: they are in the Knowledge page, Your rules section, shared by all your assistants. Your rules take priority, but four remain mandatory and cannot be bypassed: announcing that it is an artificial intelligence, inviting a caller in danger to dial 15 or 112 themselves, refusing sensitive data, honouring a refusal to be recorded.

Eight ready-made templates are offered: hotel, tradesperson, freelancer, property management, company, car dealership, public administration and general switchboard. They drop into the field and can be edited freely.

A safety guard applies to all your text: an instruction that tries to hijack your assistant is refused on save, with a message under the field concerned.

• Call transfer: hand the call to a human when the situation calls for it. Off by default.
• Contacts: they are not set in an assistant’s settings. The contact book (Contacts page) is shared by all your assistants, with its own Settings.
• Assistant instructions: the rules specific to your business, in free text.

Only two settings live there, because everything else is set by Tinos to the best measured values. Words to recognize lists the rare words of your trade, product names, street names or staff names, that your assistant must hear correctly.

Call playback decides whether your call audio can be replayed in Conversations. When it is off, only the transcript is offered. In every case, the audio is deleted automatically after 30 days, for all accounts.

Two protections stay active with no setting to change: the artificial intelligence disclosure in the very first sentence and the moderation guardrails. The speech rate, for its part, is set in General, in three steps: Calm, Normal, Brisk.

The bottom bar gathers what brings the assistant to life. The Make a test call button opens a conversation in your browser, once you have chosen your microphone. The test is free, uses none of your minutes and does not appear in your Conversations.

The number chip opens a three-entry menu: Connect my number to keep your current line through call forwarding, Buy a number and Copy the number. A dot shows the forwarding status, active or to be checked.

Finally, duplicating an assistant is the safest way to try a variant: the copy arrives with no number attached, so no real call.