How auto-reply works

When a caller leaves you a voicemail, Rivet sends them a text reply within seconds. The reply matches the kind of call they left — a new client gets a different message than a reschedule, which gets a different message than an insurance question. This is the loop that makes a caller’s experience feel like an inbox instead of a black hole. Their phone buzzes before they put it back in their pocket.

​

The text is not AI

The text your caller receives is a plain text template you can read in advance, edit, and turn off. Rivet does not generate the reply with a language model. The only AI step in the pipeline is the category — picking which of eleven pre-written templates to send — and even that’s a local model running on Canadian hardware, with the text it picked from being entirely under your control. Practically, this means: the worst case is the caller gets a slightly mismatched canned reply (e.g. a booking template for a call that was really about insurance). They never receive a hallucinated answer or an invented business detail.

​

The eleven categories

Every voicemail gets tagged with one of these: The category is also the colored chip you see on each row in the inbox — so the categorization is visible to you, not just to the caller.

​

When each template fires

The category is picked by a local language model reading the transcript. Once the category is picked:

• If the category’s reply is enabled (you’ve turned it on in settings) — the caller receives that category’s specific text.
• If the category’s reply is disabled — the caller receives the fallback text, which is your generic “we got it, we’ll be in touch” message.
• If all categories are disabled — the fallback text becomes the universal reply. Rivet shows a “Active for all calls” badge on the fallback card so you can see this is what’s happening.
• The Missed Call category always sends — even from the carrier-level missed call with no voicemail. Otherwise the caller hears nothing back at all, which defeats the point.

​

The follow-up acknowledgment

If the caller replies to your auto-response (e.g., they text back “yes, please call me at 4 about a new client intake”), Rivet sends a short follow-up acknowledgment — “Thanks, we’ve passed your details along” — and the conversation is then in your hands. Important rule: Rivet suppresses this follow-up acknowledgment if you’ve already replied manually to the conversation. So if you see the client text and reply right away, the canned acknowledgment doesn’t stack on top of your real reply. The thread stays clean.

​

The master switch

There’s a single toggle at the top of the Auto-Reply settings that turns everything off. When the master is off:

• No category-specific replies fire.
• No fallback replies fire.
• No follow-up acknowledgments fire.
• Voicemails still record, transcribe, and tag normally — but the caller hears nothing back from Rivet.

Use this if you want to handle every reply by hand for a stretch. Most practices leave the master on.

​

Per-contact suppression

Some numbers — your spouse, your kids, friends who happen to dial the practice line by mistake — shouldn’t ever get an auto-reply. You can mark a contact as Personal from the Contacts tab, and Rivet will skip auto-replies for that number entirely. See Managing contacts for the full pattern.

​

What this gives the caller

Three things the carrier’s voicemail doesn’t:

• Acknowledgment. Their phone buzzes within seconds. They know the message got through.
• A direction. The text tells them what’s next — wait for a callback, send more details, etc.
• A thread. Their reply lands as a text, and you see it as part of the conversation, not a separate channel.

​

What you can change

Everything except the category names. See Customizing auto-reply for the full controls.

​

Related articles