#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 — such a call is recorded as "Postponed",
• 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.

#Nobody picked up

A call not answered, busy or unsuccessful is retried — three times at most, roughly ten minutes apart. If the third attempt fails too, it stays in the records with its status and waits for the next time in the schedule.

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

The call transcript does not leave the European Union. The full list of processors is in the list of sub-processors.