Frequently Asked Questions

Eliza is an AI-powered telephone receptionist built for appointment-based businesses like hair salons, beauty studios, and spas. When a customer calls your business number, Eliza answers the call, understands what they need through natural conversation, checks staff availability in real time, and books the appointment into your Eliza calendar — all without any human involvement.

Eliza is available to businesses in Europe only. Your phone number is a European local number, the timezones you can choose are European, and calls are answered from European infrastructure. If your business is outside Europe we cannot serve you yet — get in touch and we will let you know when that changes.

Three things:

• A subscription — your business phone number is bought and configured for you automatically once your first payment goes through. There is no Twilio account to set up.
• Your staff, their working hours and your services, entered on the Settings page. The calendar is built in; there is no Google Calendar to connect.
• An Eliza account — sign in at /login

Once registered, the Settings page walks you through your business details, staff, working hours and services. Most salons are fully set up in under 30 minutes.

Your number is assigned automatically when your subscription starts, and it appears on your dashboard.

Eliza speaks English, Romanian and German, and opens every call in the language you set for your business. Callers can ask it to switch mid-conversation. The dashboard, settings and account pages are available in all three languages too.

Eliza uses its own built-in calendar. Each staff member's working hours, services and time off are set on the Settings page. When a caller asks to book, Eliza checks that staff member's existing appointments against their working hours and only offers slots that are genuinely free.

If two callers reach for the same slot at the same moment, the database refuses the second one and Eliza offers that caller an alternative — you can never end up double-booked.

At the end of a successful booking, Eliza reads a 4-digit PIN back to the caller, digit by digit. Customers should note it down — it is the only way to cancel later, which is why Eliza reads it out slowly and the confirmation SMS repeats it.

If “Send SMS confirmations” is on in Settings, the caller also gets a text with the appointment details and that PIN. Your staff member is notified by SMS either way.

Yes. Customers can call back and ask Eliza to cancel or to move an appointment. Eliza asks for the day and the PIN — the time is optional, because callers remember which day they are booked far more reliably than the hour — and acts only when the PIN matches a booking on that day. Rescheduling moves the existing appointment to the new time and keeps the same PIN, so there is no new number to write down. A caller who has lost their PIN is told to contact you directly: a name is not proof of whose appointment it is, so Eliza will not accept one instead. After five wrong PINs within fifteen minutes Eliza stops accepting guesses for a while.

Eliza will explain that no one is available at that specific time and suggest the nearest available slot. If the caller has no preference for a particular staff member, Eliza checks all staff who offer the requested service and picks the best fit.

Yes. Eliza can combine multiple services in a single booking — for example, a haircut and a beard trim. The total appointment duration is summed automatically, and Eliza only offers time slots where all the requested services fit without overlap.

• Scheduling Mode — Default. Eliza answers and books appointments normally.
• Automatic Forwarding to Human — Eliza skips all AI and forwards every incoming call directly to the phone number you specify. Useful during business hours if you prefer to handle calls yourself.
• Voicemail Mode — Eliza answers calls and delivers a custom message you write (e.g. "We're closed until Monday"). No appointments are booked.

All modes can be switched instantly from the Settings page, with no restart required.

Yes. Eliza will transfer to a human staff member in several situations:

• The caller explicitly asks to speak to a person
• The caller objects to their details being stored
• Eliza cannot understand the caller after multiple attempts

Transfers are directed to the forwarding phone number you configure in Settings. Even when running in Scheduling Mode, this number should always be set so transfers work correctly.

No audio recordings are stored on Eliza's servers. Voice audio is streamed in real time to the AI provider configured for your business — Google's Gemini API by default — and is not kept after the call ends. Only structured metadata (call duration, outcome, and a brief automated summary) is retained. See our Privacy Policy for full details.

Yes, always. Eliza's first sentence identifies it as an AI assistant, names your business, and says plainly that the caller's name, number and appointment details are stored in order to make the booking. This is built in and cannot be switched off. It is a transparency notice, not a consent form: Eliza does not stop and wait for permission, because storing those details is the very thing the caller has rung up to have done. If a caller does object to their details being stored, Eliza does not carry on regardless — it transfers them to your forwarding number instead.

Your appointment data is scoped to your business account only. Other businesses on the platform cannot access it, and our staff do not access your customer data in the normal course of business. You can permanently delete all of your data at any time from your account, and you can ask us for a copy of it in a machine-readable format — write to info@baum.ro and we will put one together for you. If you ever need us to correct or restore something directly in the database, we can do that — but only after a direct written request from you and with the explicit permission of the account owner. We never edit your data on our own initiative.

Only if you ask us to. Every business gets a call link page where customers can talk to Eliza from their browser. By default that page is reachable by anyone holding the link, but it is not listed in search engines and shows nothing about you.

In Settings → Call Handling you can switch on "Show your business details on the call page". That puts your business name and your services — with their duration and price — on the page and allows search engines to list it, so people searching for what you do can find you without ever having been sent the link. Your business description, your address, and your staff members' names with their working hours are three further switches, each off until you turn it on. Your phone number is never published.

You can switch it off again at any time. We stop publishing straight away, though we cannot control how quickly Google drops a page it has already stored. If you publish your staff members' names and hours, please make sure they are happy for that to be public.

Only as long as it is useful. Personal data is erased automatically on a fixed schedule, so your account stays GDPR compliant without you having to do anything:

• Appointments: 30 days after an appointment has taken place, everything personal about it is erased — the caller's name, phone number and PIN. The booking itself stays in your history, so your statistics are unaffected.
• Phone book: if a number hasn't called you in 180 days, its entry — including the name — is deleted.
• Call logs and voicemail: deleted once they are 180 days old.
• Deleted accounts: deleting your account schedules it for erasure 30 days later, and shows you the exact date. Nothing stops in the meantime — you keep using the service, your data stays put, and a banner on every page lets you cancel the request with one click. On that date, your account and everything belonging to it are permanently erased.

Your data lives in a managed database that is backed up automatically and regularly, so your appointments and settings are safe even in the event of a hardware failure. Backups are stored securely and are used solely to restore the service. We do not access, sell, or share your business's data with third parties — it remains yours, and only your account can view it.

Eliza is a monthly subscription with three tiers (Basic, Pro, and Business) that differ in how many calls per day are included. If you start on the Basic plan, your first month is a flat intro price, so you can try the full service cheaply before paying the regular monthly rate. The Pro and Business plans are billed at their normal price from the first month.

Your dedicated phone number is provisioned and paid for as part of your subscription — there is nothing extra to set up or pay separately. If you cancel and stay unsubscribed for an extended period, the number may be released; subscribing again assigns a new one.

Every plan includes a set number of calls per day. What happens next is up to you, in Settings. By default the line simply stops answering until the next morning in your own timezone. Alternatively you can keep it answering: either from prepaid credit you top up in advance, or by having the extra calls added to your next invoice, up to a monthly cap you choose so it cannot run away with you. Whichever you pick, the dashboard shows how many calls you have left today.

If Eliza isn't answering or booking correctly, check that:

• Your subscription is active — the line stops answering when it lapses, and once the daily call allowance for your plan is used up
• The phone number shown on your dashboard is the one your customers are actually dialling
• At least one staff member has working hours and at least one service assigned
• Working hours are configured for your staff

The Dashboard's setup banner will highlight any missing configuration. For further help, reach us at info@baum.ro.