In this guide
Introduction
The most valuable thing a receptionist does is turn a phone call into a booked appointment. Voksha does this by working from your actual calendar: it reads when you are free, offers the caller real openings, and writes the confirmed appointment back before the call ends.
Think of the agent as a receptionist who can see your diary. It will not offer Tuesday at two if you already have something at two, and it will not promise a time it cannot deliver.
This guide covers how to configure it and what happens on a live call. If you have not connected a calendar yet, start with the calendar connection guide first. Calendar booking is available on the Premium and Enterprise plans.
How Booking Works in Plain Terms
Two questions, asked quietly, mid-conversation
During a call, the agent can ask Voksha two things on your behalf.
"What times are free?" The agent asks this the moment the caller says they want to book. Voksha looks at your calendar's busy periods, removes them, keeps only the times inside your working hours, applies your buffers and notice rules, and hands back the next genuinely open slots. The agent reads them out: "I have Tuesday at two, or Wednesday morning."
"Book this one." The caller picks a time. Voksha checks the slot is still free, reserves it, writes the event to your calendar, and records the booking. The agent confirms out loud: "Booked for Tuesday at two."
The caller experiences a single smooth conversation. Behind it, those two steps are doing the work.
Setting Your Availability
Six settings that decide what the agent can offer
Availability lives on the agent's Calendar tab, below the connection. These settings are the rules the agent must respect, so it is worth setting them deliberately rather than accepting the defaults.
Timezone. Everything is interpreted in this timezone. Set it to where the business operates, not where you happen to be reading the dashboard.
Working hours. Tick the days you take appointments and set a start and end time for each. Days left unticked are never offered. The default is Monday to Friday, 09:00 to 17:00, with weekends off. Each day takes one time range.
Slot length. How long an appointment runs: 15, 30, 45, or 60 minutes. This determines how the day is divided into offerable slots, and how long the event Voksha creates will be.
Buffer between appointments. Padding in minutes after each appointment, up to 240. If you need a quarter of an hour to write notes or travel between jobs, put 15 here and the agent will never book two things back to back.
Minimum notice. How far ahead a booking must be, in hours, up to 720 (30 days). Set this to 2 and nobody can book a slot starting in the next two hours. This is what stops a caller at 8:55 taking your 9:00.
Booking horizon. How far into the future bookings are allowed, in days, from 1 up to 365. The default is 30 days, which stops callers claiming slots months out that you may want to plan differently.
Choosing Sensible Values
A dental practice with tight scheduling might use 30-minute slots, a 10-minute buffer, 4 hours notice, and a 60-day horizon.
A plumber doing callouts might use 60-minute slots, a 30-minute buffer for travel, 2 hours notice, and a 14-day horizon, since work that far out tends to get rearranged anyway.
A consultant might use 45-minute slots, no buffer, 24 hours notice so there is time to prepare, and a 90-day horizon.
The pattern: buffer covers what you do between appointments, notice covers how much warning you need, and horizon covers how far ahead you are willing to commit.
If You Connected Outlook
Microsoft publishes your configured working hours, so when you connect Outlook, Voksha can bring those hours in automatically as your starting point. Check them and adjust if needed. Google and iCloud do not expose this, so with those you set the hours yourself.
Turning Booking On
Three conditions, all required
Booking becomes live for an agent only when all three of these are true:
- The plan includes it. Premium or Enterprise.
- A calendar is connected. An active Google, Outlook, or iCloud connection on that agent.
- You have switched booking on. The enable toggle in the agent's availability settings.
When all three hold, the booking capability is attached to the agent automatically and it will start offering appointments on the next call. If any one of them stops being true, for example the plan changes or you disconnect the calendar, the capability comes off just as automatically and the agent goes back to taking messages. It will not keep offering appointments it can no longer honour.
This check runs on every booking request as well as at setup, so the agent cannot end up booking on a stale permission.
What Happens During a Call
The sequence, step by step
1. The caller asks to book. They might say it plainly or work up to it. The agent recognises the intent.
2. The agent checks your calendar. Voksha pulls your busy times for the relevant window, subtracts them from your working hours, drops anything inside your minimum-notice period, drops anything past your booking horizon, applies your buffer, and returns what is genuinely left.
3. The agent offers real times. Only slots that survived every rule are read out. There is no guessing and no "let me check and call you back."
4. The caller picks one. The agent collects what it needs: their name, a contact number, an email address if they will give one, and the reason for the appointment.
5. Voksha books it. The slot is re-checked, reserved, and written to your calendar as a real event with the caller's details attached.
6. The agent confirms. The caller hangs up knowing the time is theirs. If they gave an email address, a confirmation email goes out to them automatically.
7. You are notified. After the call ends you get your usual call notification, and it carries an Appointment booked marker so you can see at a glance that this call produced a booking. The notifications guide covers how to set that up.
How Double-Booking Is Prevented
Why two callers cannot take the same slot
This is the failure everyone worries about, and reasonably so. Two people call at the same moment, both are offered Tuesday at two, both say yes. What stops you being booked twice?
Voksha handles it in two layers.
A fresh check just before booking. Availability is re-read immediately before anything is written, not reused from earlier in the conversation. A slot that was taken while the caller was deciding is caught here.
A hard guarantee underneath. A re-check alone is not enough, because two bookings can pass their checks in the same instant. So the underlying database enforces the rule directly: only one confirmed appointment can exist for a given agent at a given start time. If two bookings genuinely race, one succeeds and the other is refused. Not by convention, but structurally, so it cannot be bypassed under load.
The second caller is not left stranded. When a slot is lost, Voksha immediately returns other openings from the same day and the agent offers them: "That one has just gone, but I have three o'clock or four thirty." The caller keeps talking rather than being told to call back.
When Something Goes Wrong
Failures do not become the caller's problem
Calendar services have outages and networks drop. The important thing is what the caller experiences when that happens.
The call never breaks. If Voksha cannot reach your calendar, the agent does not stall, error, or hang up. It says the team will confirm the appointment and follow up, then finishes the call properly. The caller has a normal conversation and a clear expectation, and you get the call notification with everything they said, so you can call back and confirm manually.
Nothing is silently deleted. If a slot is reserved but the calendar event cannot be created, the booking is marked as failed rather than erased, and the slot is freed so it can be booked again. You keep a complete record of what was attempted, including what failed.
You always have the transcript. Every call produces a recording, transcript, and summary regardless of whether booking succeeded, so no detail depends on the calendar working.
What Appears on Your Calendar
A booking Voksha makes is an ordinary calendar event. It appears in Google Calendar, Outlook, or iCloud exactly like anything else, on every device already synced to that calendar. Nothing needs to be installed and nobody needs to open the Voksha dashboard to see their day.
The event title carries the caller's name where they gave one, so your calendar reads "Appointment: Sarah Chen" rather than something anonymous.
The event description carries the reason for the appointment and the caller's phone number. You walk into the appointment knowing what it is about and how to reach them if something changes.
Duration matches the slot length you configured.
Because these are normal events, you can edit, move, or annotate them with your usual tools. Your calendar remains the single source of truth for your schedule.
Key Takeaways
Voksha reads your real calendar during the call, so the agent only ever offers times you are genuinely free.
Six settings control what can be booked: timezone, working hours, slot length, buffer, minimum notice, and booking horizon.
Booking goes live only when the plan includes it, a calendar is connected, and you switch it on. Remove any one and the capability comes off automatically.
Double-booking is prevented structurally at the database level, not just by checking first, so it holds even when two callers race for the same slot.
A caller who loses a slot is immediately offered other times from the same day rather than being told to call back.
If the calendar is unreachable, the agent says the team will follow up and finishes the call normally. Failed bookings are marked failed, never deleted.
Bookings appear as ordinary calendar events with the caller's name in the title and their reason and phone number in the description.
