AI phone assistant for home care services
Families ring in the evening and carers at shift change. Tel-Agent answers both and puts anything clinical straight through to a person.
- Which client
- Family or staff
- Clinical to a person
Why a home care service misses its out-of-hours calls
A care service's phone carries relatives, who ring when they get home from work, and carers, who ring at shift change from somebody's front door. Both of those happen outside the hours the office is staffed, and both are treated as one queue when they are nothing alike.
How the AI receptionist handles a home care call
It answers and asks who the call is about.
It asks whether the caller is family or staff, which sorts the entire list.
It asks whether anybody is at risk right now - and on any answer but no, it stops and reaches a person.
Otherwise it takes what is needed and a callback number.
The message lands on one list the on-call coordinator can actually read.
What the agent is told to ask
Written by you, in your own words, as the assistant’s instructions.
What a care service assistant should and should not handle
What it does
- Answers evenings, weekends and shift changes
- Separates family calls from staff calls at the first question
- Escalates anything clinical to a person immediately
- Records which client every message is about
- Keeps care records on the service's own machine
What it never does
- Assess a fall, a wound or a change in condition
- Answer a medication question
- Decide whether a visit can be missed or moved
- Give a relative information about somebody's health
- Hold care data on a vendor's servers
Questions
Who is calling a home care service out of hours?
Two groups with nothing in common: relatives, who ring when they get home from work, and carers, who ring at shift change from somebody's front door. The assistant asks which, and that single answer sorts the whole list.
What happens if a call is clinical?
It goes to a person immediately and is not handled. A fall, a wound, a medication question or a change in condition are transfers, every time. The assistant takes messages and routes them; it does not assess anybody's health over a phone.
Can it take a rota call from a carer?
Yes, and separating those from family calls is the first thing it does. A carer who cannot get into a flat and a relative asking about a visit time are not the same queue and should not arrive as one.
What happens on a safeguarding call?
It reaches a person. Anything that suggests somebody is at risk ends the script - it is not a message to be written down and read later.
Is the data covered by the GDPR?
Care records are health data under Article 9, a special category with a higher bar. Running the assistant on the service's own machine removes the extra processor rather than documenting it.
Does the EU AI Act allow an AI to answer a call about a visit?
Yes, under Article 50 of Regulation 2024/1689, which asks that the caller be told they are speaking to a machine - that line belongs in the greeting you configure. Annex III names emergency healthcare triage, and a call about a vulnerable adult is exactly where that line matters. The distinction the Act draws is between assisting and deciding, and this agent assists: it never assesses need or decides that a visit can wait. Austria's KI-Servicestelle at RTR publishes the same reading of the transparency duty.
Who is the data controller for what a caller to a care provider says on the phone?
You are. A call about a visit is health data about people who are often not the caller, which Article 9 treats as a special category, and Tel-Agent is self-hosted with your own model keys, so the recording, the transcript and the record it writes stay on your server and never reach Dpro GmbH. There is no processor agreement to sign with us because we never receive the data, and the source is AGPL-3.0, so you can check that rather than take our word for it.
Can a care provider run this in the United States?
There is no single federal AI statute to comply with, but a phone line carries older rules. HIPAA reaches most US home-care providers, and there is no business associate agreement to sign because recordings never leave your server. Consent to record is set state by state, and California and Illinois among others want every party to agree. Running the software yourself makes you the caller of record, so the disclosure and the recording switch are yours to set.
Not usable yet. The day it answers a real call will be a release, not a newsletter.
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