How to set up an AI
receptionist in a week.

Five steps, roughly one week.

Setting up an AI receptionist is not about installing software. It is about teaching an agent how your business handles a call, then connecting it to the tools that turn a conversation into a booking. With Anova, that work is organized into five steps — business-logic mapping, calendar and CRM integration, voice and tone calibration in English and Quebec French, QA testing, and go-live — and for a typical single-location business it fits inside a week.

The one-time $800 onboarding and setup fee on every plan covers this whole process. Your job through it is mostly to answer questions clearly; ours is to translate your answers into a configured, tested agent ready to take real calls.

Business-logic mapping.

Everything starts with how you want a call handled. We map your business logic: your hours, your services, what a typical caller asks, how you qualify a lead, your booking rules, when a call should be transferred to a human, and how you want messages and follow-ups handled. This is the brain of the agent — get it right and everything downstream behaves the way your best front-desk person would.

For a Montreal business this is also where the bilingual logic is defined: which languages you serve, how the agent should greet callers, and how it switches between English and French. The output is a clear playbook the agent follows, built from a structured conversation rather than a pile of forms.

Calendar and CRM integration.

Next we connect the agent to the tools that make a call useful. The calendar integration lets it book straight into your real availability — no double-bookings, no callback to confirm. The CRM or spreadsheet integration means every caller is logged with full context: who called, what they wanted, what was booked, and any notes from the conversation.

Depending on your plan this can include native CRM sync such as HubSpot or Follow Up Boss, lead scoring, and warm transfer. You provide access to your calendar and CRM; we handle the wiring so that the moment a caller books, it appears where your team already works.

See how the agent works end to end

Voice and tone calibration, EN and Quebec French.

An agent that books correctly but sounds wrong still costs you trust. So we calibrate voice and tone for native English and Quebec French — not a generic translation, but phrasing that sounds local and matches how your business actually speaks to customers. We tune greetings, pacing, warmth, and the exact wording for common moments like taking a booking or handling an objection.

You hear it and weigh in. If a phrase feels too formal, too casual, or just not you, we adjust it. By the end of this step the agent sounds like a natural extension of your front desk in both languages, which is exactly what a Montreal caller expects.

QA testing, then go-live.

Before a single real customer reaches it, we put the agent through QA. We run test calls in both languages across the scenarios that matter — a straightforward booking, an unusual request, a caller who needs a human, a question outside the script — and confirm that bookings land correctly in your calendar and leads log cleanly to your CRM.

When it passes and you have signed off, we go live. Your number routes to the agent, and it starts answering — on the first ring, 24/7, in English and French. Most businesses launch quietly first, letting the AI catch after-hours and overflow calls, then expand its role once they have heard it perform on real calls.

See plans and what's included

It keeps getting sharper.

Go-live is the start of the relationship, not the end of the project. After launch you get post-call analysis and transcripts, so you can see exactly how calls are going. We tune the agent based on real traffic — refining phrasing, adding answers to questions that keep coming up, and adjusting booking rules as your business changes. The more real calls it handles, the more precisely it reflects how you actually operate.

Setup, answered.