Help Center

Business hours

Your agent answers 24/7 whatever you set here. Business hours don't decide when it picks up — they decide what it tells callers, and when it's willing to book them in.

Where to set them

Account Settings → Business, alongside your business name, address and timezone. Set open and close times per day, and mark the days you're closed.

They're on the Account Settings page rather than under AI Agent because they describe your business, not your agent's behaviour — the same reason your address lives there.

Your agent always answers

This is the most common misunderstanding, so it's worth being blunt: setting business hours does not stop your agent picking up outside them. A call at 2am is still answered, still transcribed, still logged, and still counts toward your minutes.

That's usually the point. Answering the calls that used to hit voicemail after hours is most of the value, and you'll get a celebratory email the first time your agent handles one.

What hours actually change

What your agent says. Asked "are you open?" or "what time do you close?", it answers from these hours.
When it will book. Appointment slots are only ever offered inside your open hours. A closed day is never offered at all. See Availability rules.
Which calls count as after-hours on your dashboard.

It won't say the timezone out loud

Your agent uses your timezone for all the scheduling maths, but doesn't recite it. A caller asking your hours hears "we're open nine to five" — not "...Central Daylight Time." A caller is almost always local to you, and no human receptionist would append a timezone to every answer.

The timezone itself is set on the same tab, and was chosen when you claimed your number. See Choosing your phone number & timezone.

If you never set any

Business hours start out unset — nothing in signup forces you to fill them in, unlike your timezone. Your agent handles this honestly rather than guessing:

Asked about hours in conversation, it says plainly that hours haven't been set up yet, then carries on normally — offering to take a message or a callback.
Asked to book, it says the business hasn't configured its calendar hours yet rather than offering times it has no basis for.

It will never invent a schedule

An agent that confidently tells a caller you're open until six when you close at four is worse than one that says it doesn't know. That's the trade being made here — but it's still a bad first impression, and it's a two-minute fix. If booking matters to you at all, set your hours before you give the number out.

Hours vs. blackout periods

Business hours are your normal weekly pattern. For one-off closures — a holiday, a staff meeting, a morning off — don't edit your hours; add a blackout period instead. It blocks the specific window and then gets out of the way, with no risk of forgetting to put your normal hours back.