Chatonio

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Appointment booking

Support for a booking business that answers from the actual calendar.

“Anything free Saturday morning?” The AI reads your real week and answers in seconds — on WhatsApp, on your site, wherever the question came in. You finish the client in front of you.

Free to try · no credit card · calendar lookups on a paid plan

The inbox

What actually fills a booking inbox.

Three things, over and over — and every one of them arrives at the exact moment you can’t pick up the phone.

Swipe — 3 of them

It arrives while your hands are busy

You’re with the client in front of you. Forty minutes later you look at the phone, and the person who asked has already booked somewhere that answered first.

“What time do you open?” — again

Opening hours, what it costs, how long it takes. All three are already written down on your own site, and you’re still typing them out by hand between appointments.

“Can I move Saturday?”

The slot they’re giving up is only worth money if somebody else hears about it today. Reply at closing time and it’s an empty hour you’ve already paid rent on.

Grounded

Every answer comes from the actual calendar.

Connect your booking system once and the AI reads the real week — what’s free, how long the service takes, what it costs — before it writes a word.

Your booking system becomes a tool
Give it the endpoint your booking system already has. When somebody asks about Saturday, the AI calls it and answers from the week that came back — not from what was free last time it looked.
No API? It reads the page
Point it at your booking page and it fetches that instead. Same grounding, same audit, and nobody on your side has to build anything.
Reading is automatic. Booking asks first.
Looking at the calendar happens on its own. Putting something into it is a different thing: you turn on confirmation for the booking action, and the AI stops, reads the day, the time and the service back to the customer, and waits for a clear yes before it writes.
Your systems
Your calendarAPI
Your services and pricesKB
Your opening hoursKB
Your cancellation policyKB
Chatonio AI
10:30 taken · 14:00 open · 16:15
Read from your calendar
Ivy Lane Studio
WhatsApp · 18:20
Anything free Saturday morning? Cut and colour
AISaturday morning I’ve got 09:15 and 11:30 free. A cut and colour is booked as 2 hours 15 minutes, and it comes to €96.
11:30 please. Can you hold it without the deposit? I’ll probably come, I just don’t want to pay anything today
AISaturday, 11:30, cut and colour — 2 hours 15 minutes, €96. Say yes and I’ll put it in the calendar.
The deposit I can’t move, though. Colour appointments carry a €20 deposit, and waiving it isn’t mine to decide.
I’ve been coming here four years. Can you not just squeeze me in at 8 before you open instead
Escalated to an operator · 18:24
AIDropping the deposit and starting before opening are both the studio’s call, not mine. Someone has been paged and will pick this up here.
See it

One Saturday, asked for at closing time.

The times, the length of the service and the price are read from a calendar, not written from memory. The studio here is an example; the mechanism is the shipped one — a full Saturday comes back full, and the assistant has no way to offer a slot the calendar didn’t return.

Four things happened there. It read the real week instead of remembering one. It offered to book, then asked for a yes before writing anything into the calendar. It refused to waive a deposit — money is your call, not a bot’s. And it only mentioned a person after one had actually been paged.

Illustrative conversation. The AI answers from your own data — it will not state a status, a price or a date that nothing backs up.

Build one from your own site
Guardrails

What it is told never to say.

Every vendor tells you their AI is accurate. This is the list of things this one is told never to say — and the layer that blocks it even when it tries.

Swipe — 4 rules

told never to

It won’t offer a slot it hasn’t read

Availability moves minute to minute — somebody books on your site while the chat is still open. A time offered from memory is two people standing in your doorway at eleven o’clock.

enforced by the platform

It won’t tell somebody they’re booked

A booking is confirmed by your calendar or it isn’t confirmed at all. If nothing in your data backs the claim, the message doesn’t get sent. A wrong confirmation is a person standing outside your door on Saturday.

told never to

It won’t invent a price, or waive a fee

It quotes the duration and the price on your list and nothing else. A deposit, a late-cancellation charge, an exception for somebody who has been coming for years — those are yours to decide, not a bot’s.

told never to

It won’t answer for the person doing the work

Whether a treatment suits the customer, whether their hair will take the colour, whether it’s safe alongside something else they’re booked in for — those are judgements made in the chair, not in a chat window. Your assistant is instructed to hand the question to a person rather than answer it, however confidently it could have guessed.

The first, third and fourth are instructions your assistant follows. The second is enforced by the platform: a time, a price or a confirmation that nothing in your data supports is blocked before it is sent, whatever the assistant was told.

not sentYou’re all booked in for Saturday at 10:30 — see you then!
Blocked — nothing in your calendar confirms that booking
I can’t tell you that’s booked — 10:30 has gone. Saturday still has 09:15 and 11:30 free, and I’ve passed this on so somebody can sort it out with you here.

The first message is what an ungrounded assistant sends when somebody asks nicely. It never reached the customer. The second one did. Every block is written to an audit log and the conversation is escalated — you find out, not the person turning up on Saturday.

It’s checked after it’s written
Every draft is audited against the evidence — this turn’s calendar lookup, the customer’s own messages, your knowledge base — before it is saved or sent.
When the check fails, it stays silent
If the audit errors or can’t parse the reply, the message is blocked anyway. The failure mode is silence and a paged person, never a confident guess about your Saturday.
It can’t promise a person it hasn’t paged
The AI is never allowed to tell a customer that somebody will confirm, call back or sort it out unless the system has actually escalated and paged one.
While you’re busy

Nobody has to stop what they’re doing. Nobody has to stay late.

The AI is the first responder by default, not something you fall back on when the shop is shut. And a conversation somebody claimed and then walked away from is worse than one nobody claimed — nothing else is going to pick it up.

It answers before anyone is free
A new conversation belongs to the AI from the first message. Nobody has to be at the desk for somebody to get a real answer at twenty past six in the evening.
A timer you set
Five minutes by default. If a claimed conversation goes that long without a reply — because the client in the chair needed you — the assistant comes back in.
Cancelled the second they reply
An operator who does answer never sees the AI talk over them. And if you’d rather it stayed quiet while somebody is around, that’s a setting: always, only when nobody’s online, or never.
The customer asks
“Anything free Saturday morning?”
The AI reads the calendar and answersanswers in seconds
The free times on the day they asked about, how long the service takes and what it costs — read from your own systems.
Needs a person?
Your escalation rules, a deposit somebody wants waived, or an operator who went quiet — here’s what happens next:
No
Answered from the calendar, and the conversation closes itself.
Yes
A person is paged first — and only then is the customer told somebody is coming.
Setup

Paste your site. It writes the answers you’re tired of typing.

The first hour is usually why this never gets done. Here it’s a paste and a read-through.

Swipe — 3 steps

1

Paste your URL

It reads your public pages and writes real knowledge-base articles, real FAQ entries and a first draft of your assistant’s instructions — hours, services, prices, policy — in your language.

2

Nothing it can’t prove

The articles are your own pages, in your own words. Where it draws a conclusion about your business, it has to point at the exact sentence that supports it — anything it can’t, it drops.

3

Connect your calendar

Bring the endpoint your booking system already has and we wire the lookup with you. No API to give us? It can read your booking page instead.

Channels

Your customers ask on WhatsApp, long after you’ve locked up.

WhatsApp, Telegram, your website chat, Viber and email — the same assistant, the same calendar and the same knowledge base behind every one of them. One inbox, so you’re not checking app after app between clients.

Booking FAQ

Questions, answered.

Will it book people in on its own?
Only if you build a tool that writes to your diary, and even then only the way you set it up. Reading your calendar happens on its own; writing is a per-tool switch called confirmation, and it is off unless you turn it on — so turn it on for anything that books, moves or cancels. With it on, the AI reads the day, the time and the service back to the client in plain words and waits for a clear yes before anything goes in.
Someone wants a cut, a colour and a treatment in one visit. Can it handle that?
It can hold that conversation and read back, from your own data, what each service takes and what it costs. Whether the three of them fit into one afternoon with one stylist is arithmetic your booking system does: if it gives that answer out, the AI reads it; if it doesn’t, the AI collects the whole request and hands it over in one piece. Either way nobody has to ring back and ask what the client already said.
Can it cut down no-shows — take a deposit, chase people?
It does not handle money. There is no payment step for your clients inside the chat, so a deposit stays where you take it today: your booking system’s own checkout, or a link you send. It has no timed reminder either — messaging somebody the day before their appointment is your booking system’s job, not the assistant’s. What it does do is put your deposit and cancellation terms in front of somebody at the moment they are booking, which is the one moment people read them — and it answers from what you wrote, so a term you have not written down is a term it will not state.
What if it confirms a slot somebody has just taken?
It reads the day when it is asked, not from memory, so the gap is the seconds between reading and writing. Your booking system is the one that accepts or rejects the write, and a clean rejection comes back to the AI as data: it tells the client it could not put the booking in and asks them to pick again, rather than announcing a slot it does not have. A refusal your system answers cleanly is not treated as a fault, so nobody is paged for it automatically — the conversation is sitting in your inbox like any other. A genuine fault, a timeout or an endpoint that has moved, is what makes it stop and call a person.
Do I need my booking software’s vendor involved?
For most of it, no. Opening hours, services, prices, deposit terms, your cancellation rules — that comes off your own pages, and it answers all of it before anything is connected to anything. Reading your live diary is the one part that needs an endpoint from your booking system, and somebody builds that lookup once in the admin: you bring the endpoint and we wire it with you. If your software won’t give you one, point it at your public booking page instead and it reads that.
People ask what a colour costs and the honest answer is “it depends”. What does it say?
Whatever you have written. If your price is a range that turns on length, condition or a consultation, write that down once — the range, and why it is a range — and that becomes the answer every time, instead of a conversation you have forty times a week. What it won’t do is pick a number to be helpful: a price that nothing in your own material supports does not get sent.

Stop losing the message you couldn’t answer.

Point it at your site and it writes its own knowledge base — free to try, no credit card.

See pricing