Configure Your AI Receptionist — Persona, Greeting, and Tools

The AI receptionist is the most valuable thing Captivar does. A visitor lands on the client’s site, opens the chat, and gets answers that sound like they came from the business itself — qualifying intake, booking appointments, capturing leads, escalating to a human when needed. This article covers every setting that shapes how the receptionist behaves.

Two things to understand first

The receptionist is per-site. Each client site has its own receptionist with its own persona, greeting, business hours, and knowledge. Configurations do not bleed across sites — a dental practice’s receptionist will never quote a law firm’s hours, even if both are on your account.

The receptionist is off by default. Adding a site does not create a live chat widget on the client’s website. You need to configure the receptionist, enable it, then install the widget script. This is intentional — the receptionist should never go live with default settings; every business needs its own voice.

Where to find the configuration

In the dashboard sidebar, click Receptionist. You’ll see the receptionist configuration page for the site currently selected in the site switcher at the top. If you have multiple sites, switch sites with the dropdown — each one has its own page.

The configuration page is split into six sections:

1. Identity — greeting, persona, tone, brand avatar
2. Business hours — when the receptionist behaves as “during hours” vs “after hours”
3. Tools — what the receptionist is allowed to do (book, capture leads, escalate)
4. Escalation — where transferred conversations go
5. Off-hours behavior — what changes after hours
6. Status — the enable/disable switch and the embed script

We’ll walk through each one.

Identity — greeting, persona, tone

Identity is the most user-visible set of settings. Get these right and the receptionist feels like it was written by the business owner.

Greeting

The first message a visitor sees when they open the chat. This is not generated by the AI — it’s a static string you write. The visitor sees it immediately on open, before they’ve typed anything.

A good greeting does three things in one or two sentences:

• Welcomes the visitor warmly
• Identifies who they’re talking to (the business name, not “an AI”)
• Hints at what the receptionist can help with

Examples of greetings that work:

“Hi! I’m Alex with Milan Legal. I can answer questions about employment cases or book you a free consultation — what brings you here today?”

“Welcome to Brightside Dental. I can check insurance, book a cleaning, or help with an emergency visit. How can I help?”

Avoid greetings that are generic (“How can I help you today?”) or that overshare (“I’m an AI assistant powered by…”). The receptionist should feel like staff, not software.

Persona

Persona is a free-text field that gets appended to the AI’s system prompt. This is where you describe who the receptionist is and how they should behave. The AI uses this to color every response.

Persona is for things like:

• The name and title to use (“You are Alex, the front-desk associate at Milan Legal”)
• Whether to be formal or warm (“Use a warm, conversational tone — match the prospect’s energy, not the practice’s brand guidelines”)
• What to never do (“Never quote a price for a specific case — always say ‘depends on circumstances’ and offer the consultation”)
• House rules specific to the business (“If someone asks for medical advice, decline politely and recommend they speak to Dr. Patel directly”)

A persona that’s 3-6 sentences works well. Personas longer than that start to dilute — the AI weights everything, so a long persona drowns out the more important business rules.

Tone

A dropdown alternative to writing a persona. Three options:

• Friendly — warm, conversational, light contractions, occasional emoji
• Professional — measured, no contractions, no slang, no emoji
• Casual — distinctly relaxed, conversational, modern

Tone and persona stack — picking a tone sets baselines, the persona overrides where they differ. For most businesses, Professional is the safe default. Law firms, financial advisors, and medical clinics should almost always be Professional. Creative agencies, home services, and consumer brands often work better with Friendly.

Brand avatar

A small circular image displayed next to every receptionist message in the chat. Defaults to the Captivar mark. Replace it with the client’s logo or a photo of the staff member the receptionist is named after.

The image is loaded from a URL — paste any publicly accessible image link. Square images, 200×200 pixels or larger, work best.

Business hours

The receptionist behaves differently during business hours vs after hours. Business hours is configured per day of the week.

For each day:

• Mark the day as open or closed
• If open, set one or more time windows (e.g., 9:00 AM–12:00 PM, 1:00 PM–5:00 PM for businesses with a lunch break)

Set the time zone to the business’s local time zone. The receptionist uses this to compare the current time against the schedule on every conversation. If a visitor in Singapore chats with a Los Angeles dental practice at 3 AM Pacific, the receptionist treats that as after hours.

Tools — what the receptionist can do

The AI receptionist has access to a set of tools it can invoke during a conversation. Each tool is a discrete action — book an appointment, capture a lead, transfer to a human, look up business hours. You enable the tools that match what the business wants the receptionist to actually do.

The standard tools:

• Capture lead. When the conversation surfaces a qualified prospect, the receptionist gathers name, email, and phone, and creates a lead pipeline entry. The lead notification email fires immediately. Recommended: on for all sites.
• Book appointment. The receptionist can look at calendar availability and book a slot directly during the conversation. Requires a calendar to be configured for the site. Recommended: on for sites that take appointments.
• Transfer to human. When the visitor explicitly asks for a human, or when the receptionist hits a question it cannot answer, it sends a transcript to your escalation email and tells the visitor a human will follow up. Recommended: on for sites with active staff.
• Get business hours. The receptionist can answer “are you open right now?” or “when do you open?” without making it up. Always available — no toggle.

Tools you’ve enabled are listed at the bottom of the system prompt the AI sees on every message. The AI decides when to invoke them based on the conversation. You do not script them — you authorize them.

Escalation

If you enabled the transfer to human tool, set the escalation email. This is the address that receives a conversation transcript when the receptionist hands off.

The transcript includes:

• Every message in the conversation
• The visitor’s captured contact info (if any)
• A short AI-generated summary of what they wanted
• A link to view the full session in the dashboard

Set this to the email of whoever responds to leads fastest at the business. For a small practice, that’s usually the owner or the office manager. For a larger agency client, it might be a shared inbox monitored by intake staff.

Off-hours behavior

When the current time is outside the business hours you set, the receptionist’s behavior shifts. You configure exactly how.

The options:

• Same behavior as during hours — the receptionist works identically 24/7. Good for businesses that genuinely operate around the clock.
• Capture only — the receptionist still answers questions but does not attempt to book appointments. It always ends by offering to take the visitor’s contact info so the team can reach out in the morning.
• Notify-and-defer — the receptionist explicitly tells the visitor the office is closed, captures their contact, and promises a callback by the next business day.
• Disabled — the chat widget is hidden entirely. The visitor sees no chat option after hours.

For most businesses, notify-and-defer is the right answer. It’s honest about timing, captures the lead, and sets the right expectation. The receptionist’s voice should remain warm — being closed should not feel like a wall.

Enabling and embedding

Once the configuration is set, flip the Enable receptionist toggle at the bottom of the page. The page reveals the embed script. Paste this into the client’s website the same way you installed the tracker:

<script async src="https://app.captivar.com/widget/chat.js?id=TMP-XXXXXX"></script>

Replace TMP-XXXXXX with the site’s tracking ID — the same one you used for the tracker. You can use both scripts on the same page, in any order. The chat widget appears as a floating bubble in the bottom-right corner.

What happens next

The receptionist is configured and enabled. It will answer visitors right now using whatever it knows about the business — but right now, that’s only what the persona field says. To make it useful, the receptionist needs knowledge about the business: services, pricing, hours, policies, common questions.

The next article walks through how Captivar feeds the receptionist that knowledge — and how you edit and curate what it sees.