How long does it take to set up an AI receptionist?

About two hours of your time overall with Echo. Enabling the EHR integration takes roughly 30 minutes, and the configuration that actually matters — your providers, your visit types and their real lengths, your triage rules, and your after-hours protocol — takes up to two hours with Echo's team walking you through it. Most practices are live within days.

No to both. Echo runs on the number your patients already have and the phone system you already use, so there is nothing to publish, reprint, or update in directories. New hardware is not required. If a vendor asks you to change your published number, ask why — that cost lands on you, not them.

Three things make onboarding fast: a clear list of your visit types with their real durations, your provider-to-visit-type mapping, and your after-hours and triage protocol written down. Most practices discover during this step that these rules live in one person's head, which is worth capturing regardless of which vendor you choose.

Not in the usual sense. Echo is mobile first: most work never reaches a person, and the exceptions arrive as a notification on a phone your staff already carry, with the conversation attached. There is no dashboard to check each morning and no second inbox to drain, which matters because front-desk turnover means anything requiring training needs retraining.

Yes. Echo's 14-day trial is sandbox-only by design: verified phone numbers, no patient outreach, and no EHR integration, so you can hear exactly how it sounds without any protected health information involved. Real patient contact requires a paid plan and a signed BAA.

After a dry run and the signed BAA, Echo begins answering calls, texts, and web forms and booking into your schedule under the rules you configured. Multi-location groups go live office by office rather than all at once, so a problem at one site does not become a problem everywhere.

Yes, and same-day. Rules are built in a workflow builder your team can read and edit in plain language, with no engineer and no vendor ticket. This matters more than it sounds: a new provider, added Saturday hours, or an updated clinical protocol should not put your phone coverage in a support queue.