Talkify is an AI receptionist for physio, chiro, osteo, podiatry and massage clinics running Cliniko, for clinics in New Zealand and Australia alike. It answers the number you already have, on the phone company you already use, in a real local voice. It greets a patient it recognises by their first name and offers appointment times your Cliniko diary says are genuinely free.
Then it stops. It is never given a treatment note, it is never told what an appointment is for, and it gives no health advice of any kind. In a clinic that restraint is the point, not the small print.
The Cliniko connector is in early access. It is built and tested against Cliniko's published API, and we are switching it on one clinic at a time so we sit with you while it goes live rather than leaving you to it. One API key connects it, and you keep the switches: every ability that writes into your diary is yours to turn on, and moving and cancelling an appointment stay off until you decide otherwise.
Read this part first, because it is the reason to choose this one. None of these is a setting we have switched off for you or a promise about how carefully we have written the instructions. There is no code behind any of it, so there is nothing to misconfigure, nothing to leak and nothing an unusual caller can talk it into.
No treatment note, no patient case, no medical alert, no result, no referral. There is no code in the connection that reads any of it, so there is nothing to switch on, nothing to misconfigure and nothing an unusual caller can talk it into.
An appointment type name is very often a condition by another word, so the agent gets the day, the time and the practitioner and stops there. Asked what someone is booked in for, it says plainly that it does not have that and offers to take a message.
It does not triage, does not say whether something sounds serious, and does not tell anybody what to do about a symptom. Anything urgent or distressing becomes a message for the clinic, and in an emergency it tells the caller to ring the emergency number for the country your clinic is in, 111 here and 000 in Australia. Those rules are built into every agent and cannot be edited out.
Found from the number they are ringing from, and from nothing else. There is no field where a caller can hand it a patient reference or an appointment to act on. Somebody ringing about a partner's or an adult relative's booking gets a message taken.
The call goes on the patient record as a communication, which is where a receptionist would put it, and it says on its face that nothing in it has been assessed by a clinician. We never write a treatment note.
No card numbers, no balances, no invoice questions. If money comes up it takes a message for whoever handles it, which for most clinics is the right answer anyway.
Everything it does, on the mornings when the phone goes four times while you have your hands on somebody's shoulder.
Six things happen while you are treating somebody. You do none of them.
On the first ring, in a genuine local voice, using your clinic name and your greeting. No hold music, no menu, no "press one for reception". Five people can ring at once and all five are answered.
If the number belongs to one of your patients it greets them by their first name. That is all it is given: no date of birth, no address, no history, nothing clinical. Enough to sound like your front desk, and not a word more.
Then matches it to the appointment types you have ticked, with the length you have set for each. It never invents a service, and it will not put a first-time caller into a follow-up slot because the words sounded close.
This is the part that matters. We do not work availability out ourselves. Cliniko does, because it already knows the practitioner's roster, their breaks, their leave, what is booked and how long that appointment takes. The agent asks and reads back two or three of the answers.
After checking, at that moment, that the slot is still there. If the front desk took it while the caller was talking it does not book, it says so and offers what is left. It is told never to say an appointment is made unless it actually is.
A reception note on the patient record saying the call happened, when, and what it was about. You get the whole call as a text and an email within seconds. Nothing clinical is written, and nothing clinical was read.
Your locations, your practitioners, your appointment types and your real diary, working the phone at the hours a clinic cannot.
Availability comes out of Cliniko on the call, already netted against the practitioner's roster, their breaks and leave, what is booked and the length of the appointment type. So the agent offers a time, not a day, and never a time Cliniko did not give it.
It offers what you tick, in your own names for it. Leave nothing ticked and it uses the types you already publish for online booking, which is the cautious default: plenty of appointment types are internal, reviews or one clinician only.
A real appointment in Cliniko against a named practitioner, with a short practical note for reception. New patient, asked about parking, needs a ground floor room. Arrangements only, never symptoms.
The chosen time is re-checked against a fresh read in the second before anything is written, and Cliniko refuses a clash as well. Two guards, and an agent that is told to say the slot went rather than claim a booking that did not happen.
Two separate switches, both off to begin with. Moving reads the appointment back first so you both know which one it is. Cancelling records the caller's own words and never asks why. Most clinics should leave cancelling off, and we will say so.
Off is genuinely off: the ability is removed from the agent rather than discouraged in its instructions, and the connection refuses it as well. Connect Cliniko, watch what it reads back, and turn things on when you are ready.
Cliniko is where the diary lives. It is not where most of a clinic's phone calls actually go, so the agent is not built only out of it.
This is the one most people expect to be a catch, and it is not. Nothing is ported, no hardware is installed and your clinic line is not moved into somebody else's phone system. You forward your existing number, on your existing provider, and you choose when: always, only when the desk is already on a call, only when nobody picks up in a few rings, or only outside your hours. It takes a few minutes to set up and it takes about as long to turn off again.
The same agent that answers the phone answers the texts that come into the same number, knowing the same appointment types and the same free times. It is not a second product with a second login and a second bill, and a patient who rings and then texts is not starting again with something that has never heard of them.
Most calls to a clinic are not booking requests. Parking, whether you are up a flight of stairs, ACC, whether you take walk-ins, what a first appointment costs, when the physio is back from leave. None of that is in Cliniko and all of it is in the agent, alongside your trading hours, your public holidays and your own rules about who a caller gets put through to and when.
If a call ends with a detail missing, the agent works out what it is short of and texts the patient for it afterwards, then reads the reply back into the record. So a booking taken at ten at night by somebody who would not spell their surname is a complete one by the morning, without anybody at the desk making the call.
Not just a note on a record. Every call lands as a lead, and you decide what a lead does: ring somebody, text somebody, hit a webhook, push into your CRM, or post into Slack or Microsoft Teams so the person who needs to know sees it while it still matters.
Anything clinical, anything distressing, anything about an account. The agent takes a proper message with the name, the number and what they wanted, and puts the urgent ones through to whoever you have nominated, on rules you set line by line. Knowing what to hand over is most of the job in a clinic.
You are responsible for your patients' information, so this is the section to hold a supplier to. Here is the whole of it, in the detail you would want in writing.
New Zealand numbers are answered in New Zealand data centres and Australian numbers in Australia. Audio, transcripts and call details are encrypted at rest with AES-256 and handled in line with the Privacy Act. Your clinic timezone is set on the connection, so a caller in Perth is told a Perth time and a caller in Napier is told a Napier one.
Cliniko cannot be searched by phone number, so recognising a caller needs a small index of our own. Here is everything in ours: a one way scrambled version of each phone number, and the reference of the patient it belongs to. That is the lot. No names, no phone numbers you could read, no email addresses, no dates of birth, and nothing clinical. Somebody who walked off with the whole thing would hold a column of scrambles that cannot be turned back into phone numbers, and a column of references that mean nothing without your own Cliniko. The first name your agent says out loud is read from your Cliniko at the moment it says it, and is never written down here. The index expires by itself and rebuilds from your account, so disconnecting ends it.
Ring our agent and put it through its paces. Book a fake appointment, ask it something it should refuse to answer, try to talk it into telling you about somebody else. Most people ring expecting a robot and hang up having had a conversation. No sign-up, no card, answering around the clock.
Everyone worries about the answerphone at night. That is not where a clinic loses new patients.
Somebody is paying at the desk, somebody else is filling in a form, and the phone is ringing. One person cannot absorb that, and the overflow used to be a busy tone or a message nobody hears until after lunch. The agent answers all three at the same moment, in your clinic's name.
Somebody who has hurt themselves rings whoever is nearest and books the one that picks up. That is an initial consult plus the six follow-ups it turns into, decided by who answered rather than who was better. Work out what yours are worth on the missed call calculator.
The same agent, the same knowledge of your clinic, pointed in the other direction. Every one of these is live today.
Recalls for patients you have not seen in a while, reminders, and follow-ups after a course of treatment. You load the list, it makes the calls, and the same restraint about clinical information applies going out as coming in.
Connected to your Xero, the agent rings the invoices that have gone past due, in your name and your wording, and writes the outcome and any promise to pay onto the invoice. No commission, no collection agency.
The same brain in a chat widget on your site, in text or voice, from $49 a month. It knows the same appointment types and the same free times as the one on the phone.
Phone campaigns that ring your patient list after a course of treatment and report the answers back, without anyone at the desk sitting on hold.
The Monday after a long weekend, or the week a marathon has been run. Call centre plans answer five, ten or fifteen callers at the same moment, with no queue and no hold music.
The Personal Assistant answers one person's own line rather than the clinic number, screens the rubbish and texts you what mattered. From $89 a month.
To start building your agent, complete the form, or ask our agent to get you started. No card needed for the demo.
The questions we hear most. If yours isn't here, ring our live demo agent on 03 242 1262, it'll either answer or queue a callback from a human.
How the agent handles a clinic day, from the eight o'clock rush to the enquiry that arrives at nine at night, whether or not you run Cliniko.
There is a connector for that too, for the spa and wellness end of the same street.
What Talkify connects to today, and what your agent can do once it is connected.