Your assistant

Create your assistant

Create a new AI assistant from an agent type and a starter template, write its greeting and instructions, and choose how it sounds and which language it speaks.

An assistant is the AI that answers your calls, texts and website chats. You can have more than one, for example a front-desk assistant and a sales assistant, each with its own greeting, instructions, voice and phone number. This guide walks you through creating one and getting its basic settings right. You need an AIVA account. To hear it on a real call later, you also need your OpenAI key and a phone number connected.

1. Start a new assistant

In the sidebar, under AI Configuration, open Assistants.
Click New assistant. A panel opens on the right: "Start from a template. You can change everything later."
Type a Name, for example "Front desk assistant".
Under Choose an agent type, pick the role closest to what this assistant will do:
- General Purpose: no specialization. You set up the instructions and tools yourself.
- Receptionist Agent: answers inbound calls, shares business information and routes callers.
- Sales Agent: qualifies leads, answers product questions and schedules meetings.
- Support Agent: handles common support requests, looks up knowledge and escalates problems it can't solve.
- Follow-up Agent: makes follow-up calls, records outcomes and creates tasks for your team.
Under Quick Start Templates, pick a starting point. Industry templates (for example Dental Clinic, Home Services, Law Firm, Real Estate or Salon & Spa) come with a ready-made greeting and instructions. Start from Scratch gives you a blank assistant.
Click Create draft.

You'll see "Draft created. Publish it when you're ready." and the full editor opens for the new assistant.

If you haven't created an assistant yet, AIVA may open the full-page Create Assistant form instead. It asks for the same basics and finishes with Create Assistant. Either way, you edit the assistant afterwards in the editor below.

The agent type is set once, when you create the assistant. Some types switch off actions they don't need. For example, the Receptionist, Support and Follow-up types don't book appointments or send payment links. You can turn individual actions back on later from the Actions tab.

2. Fill in the General tab

The editor has these tabs: General, Instructions, Voice, Handoff, QA, Actions, Test and Versions. Start with General:

Assistant Name and Label: how the assistant shows up in your dashboard.
Type: the agent type you picked (read-only).
Language: a label only. The language the assistant actually speaks on calls is set on the Voice & Speech page (see step 5).
Timezone: used for greetings and business hours.
Greeting: the first thing callers hear. Use {business_name} to insert your business name, and say that the caller is speaking with an AI assistant. The Preview below the field shows how it will read.

The General tab also holds the assistant's Business hours, its Google Calendar connection and its linked Numbers. Each has its own guide (see Next steps).

3. Write the instructions

Open the Instructions tab. The Instructions field (up to 4,000 characters) tells the assistant who it is, what it can do and what it must never do.

If you'd rather not write it from scratch:

Click Generate Prompt with AI.
In Describe your assistant's role for AI Generation, describe the job in a sentence or two.
Click Generate Now. The result replaces what's in the Instructions field, so you can read it and edit it.

Keep business facts such as hours, prices and policies out of the instructions. Put them in AI Training instead, so you can update them without changing how the assistant behaves.

4. Pick a voice

Open the Voice tab:

Voice: choose one of the 10 voices: Alloy, Ash, Ballad, Coral, Echo, Sage, Shimmer, Verse, Marin or Cedar.
Speaking speed: from Slower through Normal to Faster.
Interruption sensitivity: Hard to interrupt, Balanced or Easy to interrupt. This sets how easily a caller can cut the assistant off mid-sentence.

5. Set the language and other voice settings

Language and the finer call settings live on their own page. In the sidebar, open Voice & Speech, then choose the assistant in Settings for.

Under Language, choose Which language should the assistant use:

Option	What it does
Follow the caller	Detects the language the caller speaks and replies in it.
Always one language	Always speaks the language you choose, whatever the caller says.
Two languages	Starts in the First language and switches to the Second language when the caller does.

AIVA supports 13 voice languages: English, Hindi, Gujarati, Spanish, French, German, Italian, Portuguese, Dutch, Arabic, Mandarin, Japanese and Korean.

Other settings on this page worth knowing:

Voice: press play to hear each voice. Sample sentence sets what the preview says.
Listening and turn-taking: how the assistant knows the caller has finished, how easily it can be interrupted and how quickly it replies.
End the call after silence: hangs up if nobody speaks for the time you set.
Background sound: Play a background sound mixes a quiet ambience behind the AI's voice.

Click Save changes when you're done.

6. Save and publish

At the bottom of the editor:

Save draft keeps your changes without making them live. You need a name and a greeting to save.
Publish makes the draft live on calls. You also need instructions to publish.

AIVA may show Before you publish warnings, for example if the greeting doesn't say the caller is speaking with an AI. Choose Go back and fix or Publish anyway.

In the Assistants list, each assistant shows its status: Draft (never published), Live, Live · edits not published or Archived.

Common questions

Can I change the agent type later? No. To change what the assistant can do, use the Actions tab, or create a new assistant with a different type.

How many assistants can I have? 2 on Starter, 5 on Growth and unlimited on Pro.

Next steps

Something here doesn’t match what you see in the dashboard? Email support@aivachat.io and we’ll fix the guide.