AI phone assistant for heating engineers
No heat in January is not the same call in every household. Tel-Agent asks about carbon monoxide first, then about who is in the house.
- Smell of gas
- Anyone vulnerable
- Heat or hot water
Why a heating call in winter is not one kind of call
No heating in January is an inconvenience in one house and a serious problem in another. A heating engineer's phone in a cold snap carries far more calls than anybody can answer, and the ones that need to be first are not the ones that rang first - they are the ones with a baby, an elderly resident, or a smell of gas.
How the AI receptionist handles a boiler breakdown call
It answers and takes a callback number from a house that may be cold and dark.
It asks whether there is any smell of gas - and on that answer it stops and reaches a person.
It asks whether the failure is heating, hot water, or both.
It asks whether anybody vulnerable is in the house, which is what sorts the day's list.
It takes the boiler make and age, so the engineer knows whether the part is on the van.
What the agent is told to ask
Written by you, in your own words, as the assistant’s instructions.
What a heating phone assistant should and should not do
What it does
- Answers through a cold snap without a queue
- Asks about gas before any other detail
- Records who is in the house, so the list can be prioritised
- Takes the boiler make and age for parts
- Keeps customer records on the business's own machine
What it never does
- Advise anybody to relight, reset or bleed anything
- Say whether a boiler is safe to run
- Decide on its own which household is most urgent
- Quote a repair price before the fault is known
- Send customer data to a third-party server
Questions
What comes before everything else on a heating call?
Any smell of gas. On that answer the assistant stops, reaches a person, and the caller is told to ring the national gas emergency number - nothing else on the call matters until that is settled.
Why ask who is in the house?
Because in a cold snap an engineer cannot reach everybody on the same day, and the order is a judgement about risk rather than about who rang first. Recording it consistently is what makes that judgement possible.
Can it advise a caller to reset the boiler?
No. Asking whether it has been reset is a fact; telling somebody to do it is advice about a gas appliance, and that belongs to a registered engineer.
Does it help with servicing bookings?
Those are the routine half of the phone and they go into the same list without interrupting a breakdown. Boiler make and age are taken then too, because they decide the length of the appointment.
What about landlord safety certificates?
They are taken as scheduled work with the property address and the access details. They are a deadline job rather than an urgent one, and separating the two is most of what this does.
Does the EU AI Act allow an AI to answer a no-heating call?
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. Nothing about this work falls under Annex III, the list of high-risk uses. The distinction the Act draws is between assisting and deciding, and this agent assists: it never decides on its own that a job is or is not an emergency. 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 heating engineer says on the phone?
You are. A no-heating call is ordinary personal data, plus an address a stranger now knows is empty, 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 heating engineer run this in the United States?
There is no single federal AI statute to comply with, but a phone line carries older rules. The TCPA governs automated outbound calls, and consent to record is set state by state. 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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