A caller asks one question. Eleven things happen before she answers.
“Automated inbound and outbound voice lines” describes a phone system. This is the actual signal path — including the three places Catlyn is structurally prevented from saying the wrong thing, and the fallback ladder that means she still has a voice when a provider goes down.
Running today
Built, not yet deployed
Hard guardrail — not a setting
She is already answering
A live advisor runs on a per-area page — one crawlable URL per ZIP, with local stores, a consent-gated handoff and the disclosure stated up front. Everything traced below is running there except the layers marked .
Open the live advisor →
Signal path · one turn
— ms to first audio
One brand, many locations
A chain with 50 stores is one configuration plus a locations table — not 50 avatars. The right store resolves at runtime from the embed, the visitor's area, or the number dialled.
Inherited · brand
Persona & voice
Catalogue
Knowledge base
Compliance regime
Overridden · location
Hours & holidays
Local stock
Local promotions
Who is on shift
Voice fallback ladder
Four tiers, tried in order. A provider outage costs her a little warmth, never her voice — and never the call. Watch tier 1 fail on this trace.
Tier 3 runs on our own hardware, so the ladder has a floor that does not depend on anyone else being up.
What she cannot do
Three boundaries enforced in code, not in a prompt. A prompt can be talked around; these cannot.
Cannot invent a fact, price or promise
Answers are constrained to the tenant's own catalogue and knowledge. No source, no claim — she says she'll check and routes it to a human.
Cannot pass as a person
Disclosure is stated in the opening turn and displayed for the length of the call. It is not a toggle a customer can be sold without.
Cannot read emotion in the EU or EEA
Affect inference is geo-gated off entirely. The EU AI Act prohibits emotion recognition in several contexts and exposure runs to 7% of turnover, so it is a boundary rather than a preference.
Trace
One inbound call, narrated by the system rather than by marketing.
—First audiocaller hears her, not a ring
—Voicemailsthe watchdog is the product
—Sources citedevery claim traceable
—Guardrails heldenforced in code
What is illustrative and what is not. The timings and the call on this page are a scripted trace of a sample tenant, not a recording. The architecture is not scripted: the location model, the fallback ladder and the three boundaries are how the system is built. Layers marked are written and tested but not yet running in production — we would rather label them than let you find out on a call.