01
Can it read our patient notes?
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No, and not as a setting we have switched off for you. There is no part of Talkify that reads a treatment note, a patient case, a medical alert, a result or a referral, so there is nothing to turn on, nothing to misconfigure and nothing an unusual caller can talk it into. The agent is reception. It can know that a caller is one of your patients and what their first name is, and it can know the day and time they are next booked in. That is the whole of it.
02
Will it tell a patient what their appointment is for?
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It cannot, because it is never told. An appointment type name is very often a condition by another word, so the agent is given the day, the time and the practitioner and nothing else. Asked what somebody is booked in for, it says plainly that it does not have that in front of it and offers to take a message or put them through to the clinic.
03
Does it give health advice, or decide what is urgent?
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Never. It does not triage, it does not say whether something sounds serious, and it does not tell anybody what to do about a symptom. If a caller describes an injury while booking, which most of them will, the agent is warm about it and books the appointment they asked for without assessing it. Anything urgent or distressing becomes a message for the clinic, and if somebody sounds like they are in an emergency it tells them to hang up and ring the emergency number for the country your clinic is in, 111 here and 000 in Australia. Those rules are built into the agent and cannot be edited out of it.
04
Can a husband ring up and move his wife's appointment?
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No. Every change the agent makes is to an appointment booked under the number the caller is ringing from, and that is the only way it can find one. There is no field where a caller can hand it a patient reference or an appointment to act on, which is deliberate: a reference somebody can read out is a reference somebody can be talked into reading out. Anyone ringing on another person's behalf gets a message taken for the front desk.
05
What does it actually do on a clinic call?
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It answers in your clinic's name, works out what the caller needs in ordinary words, offers appointment times that are genuinely free, books the one they pick, and texts and emails you the whole call within seconds. It can also tell a patient when they are next due, move an appointment and cancel one, though those last two are separate switches that both start off. Anything it should not handle becomes a message rather than a guess.
06
How is this different from a physio answering service?
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An answering service is a room of people covering many businesses, usually in business hours, billed per call or per minute. They take a message and hand it back to you, so the booking still has to be made by somebody at your clinic, and a busy month costs more than a quiet one. Talkify answers instantly at any hour, handles every caller at once, and makes the booking itself rather than passing you a name to ring back. It is a flat monthly price, so the week after a long weekend costs the same as any other. Where an answering service still wins is a call that needs a human to make a judgement, which is exactly why anything the agent should not handle becomes a message for your team instead of a guess.
07
Which clinics is this built for?
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Physiotherapy, chiropractic, osteopathy, podiatry and remedial massage clinics, in New Zealand and Australia. Single-practitioner rooms through to multi-site clinics with a dozen practitioners. It is not built for a GP practice, a hospital department or anything that needs clinical triage on the phone, because the agent does not triage and we are not going to pretend otherwise.
08
Does it work with Cliniko?
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Yes, and that connection is in early access, which means it is built and tested against Cliniko's published interface and we are switching clinics on one at a time rather than leaving anyone to it. Connected, the agent recognises a patient from the number they are ringing from, offers times Cliniko itself says are free rather than days the clinic is open, and books the appointment while the caller is still on the phone. Every one of those abilities is its own switch and they all start off.
09
How does it know what is genuinely free?
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It asks Cliniko, and that is the important part. We do not work availability out ourselves, because Cliniko already knows each practitioner's roster, their breaks, their leave, what is booked and how long that appointment type takes. The agent reads back two or three of the times Cliniko gives it, never one it invented and never one it remembers from an earlier call. In the second before it books, it checks that slot again against a fresh read, so a time the front desk took while the caller was still talking is not double booked.
10
We do not use Cliniko. Is this still for us?
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Yes. Talkify answers your clinic phone, books into Google Calendar or Outlook, takes proper messages and texts you the ones that matter, regardless of what you run the practice on. A practice management connection removes the retyping for the clinics that have one, and the same restraint about clinical information applies either way.
11
What happens to the calls we are missing at lunchtime?
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They get answered. That is where a clinic loses new patients, not overnight: reception is taking a payment, somebody else is filling in a form, and the phone is on its third ring. The agent answers every one of those at the same moment, in your clinic's name, without anybody having to say hold on. Work out what yours are worth on our missed call calculator.
12
Where are the calls handled, and what do you keep?
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Calls to New Zealand numbers are answered in New Zealand data centres and calls to Australian numbers in Australia. Audio, transcripts and call details are encrypted at rest with AES-256 and handled in line with the Privacy Act. Those recordings contain your patients' personal information, which makes you responsible for them, so it is a fair question to put to any supplier and get the answer in writing.
13
Do you keep a copy of our patient list?
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No. To greet a caller by name the agent needs some way of matching a phone number to a patient, and ours holds no names, no email addresses, no dates of birth and not even the phone numbers: it is a one way scrambled version of each number pointing at a reference in your own system, and nothing else. The first name your agent says is read from your own system at the moment it says it, and is never written down by us. It expires by itself and rebuilds from your account, so disconnecting ends it.
14
How long does it take to set up, and what does it cost?
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Same day. You keep your existing clinic number and forward it to your Talkify agent when the line is busy, after hours, or always. No hardware, no porting, no setup fee. Business agents are $129/month at the founding rate for your first 3 months, then $199, including 200 minutes of calls, with extra minutes from 10c each. A flat-out week costs the same as a quiet one, because we do not charge per call.
15
Can we listen to it before it touches the diary?
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Yes, and you should. Ring our own agent on 03 242 1262 and put it through its paces: book something, ask it a question it should refuse to answer, try to talk it into telling you about somebody else. Then when you connect your own clinic, every in-call ability stays off behind a master switch until you have watched what it reads back and decided you like it.
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