Alert Situations — How the AI Assistant Spots Urgent Calls and Notifies You Instantly

Not every call is equally urgent. A question about opening hours can wait until tomorrow — a burst pipe, a serious breakdown, or a genuinely upset customer can't. That's why the AI Assistant includes alert-situation detection: categories of events you define yourself, which the assistant recognises during the conversation and instantly notifies you about.

It's built around one idea: no truly urgent matter should sit unnoticed until someone happens to scroll back through call history.

How it works in practice

In the client panel, under a specific assistant's configuration, you define your own "alert situation" categories — for example "gas or water leak", "a serious breakdown that stops work", or "a very unhappy customer threatening to cancel". You don't need to type exact keywords — the assistant recognises the meaning of what's said, not a literal text match, so it works regardless of the exact words the caller uses to describe the problem.

What happens when one comes up

• The assistant keeps the conversation going normally, collecting the details it needs (address, description of the issue, a callback number).
• An email notification goes out immediately to your address — it doesn't wait for any reporting cycle, it arrives right away.
• If you have an active device in the OrionDial mobile app, the alert also shows up directly in the app — visible on the main screen before anyone even answers the next call.
• All alerts also appear in the panel, on the "Alert Situations" list, where you can mark them as handled.

A real-world example

A customer calls an installation company in the evening, saying "there's water pouring from a pipe in the basement". With a "water leak" category configured, the assistant recognises the urgency, collects the address and phone number, and ends the call reassuring the caller that the report has been passed on — and at that exact moment, the business owner gets an email and an app alert, before they've even had a chance to listen to the recording.

Why this isn't the same as a regular live transfer

Transferring a call live to a staff member is for situations where the caller simply wants to talk to a person. Alert situations are a separate mechanism — they work even when the caller isn't asking to speak to anyone, just mentions something urgent in passing. The assistant recognises the seriousness on its own and triggers a notification alongside the normal flow of the call.

The difference between "we'll call you back tomorrow" and "someone already knows and is on the way" can be exactly what decides whether a customer stays with your business or looks elsewhere.

Who benefits the most

Service and emergency businesses (plumbers, electricians, technical repair services), medical practices (urgent symptoms that need a faster response), and any business where one missed report could mean real damage or a lost customer — these are the natural beneficiaries of this feature. Setup takes a few minutes and is available on both the Standard and Premium plans.

It's exactly the kind of feature you don't notice until it fires — and then it turns out to have saved you far more than the cost of the licence itself.