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Glossary
Phone coverage has its own vocabulary, and most of it is used loosely. Here is what each term means on this site, in one sentence, with what Lydoh actually does spelled out underneath.
Lydoh is an AI phone assistant made by VoiceboxMD that answers calls 24/7 on a dedicated number, answers only from the content a workspace has approved, and captures what each caller needs. Medical practices also get after-hours on-call triage; individuals get call screening and phone errands run on their behalf.
All 23 terms
Answering and screening
The words for answering a phone line on someone else's behalf, and for deciding which calls are worth their attention.
An AI phone assistant is software that answers a phone number, holds a spoken conversation with the caller, and acts on what it hears.
It is not voicemail, because the caller gets answers and questions in real time. It is not a phone tree, because there is nothing to press. What it can do depends on what it is allowed to look up and what it is allowed to write down.
Lydoh is an AI phone assistant that answers calls 24/7 on a dedicated number and captures what each caller needs.
An AI receptionist is an AI phone assistant doing front desk work: greeting callers, answering routine questions, taking messages, and passing the rest to a person.
The name describes the job, not the technology, which is why the same product is sold as an AI receptionist, a virtual receptionist, or an AI answering service. Front desk calls repeat more than any other kind, which is why this is the first phone job software took on.
Lydoh hands off to a human line during business hours when a caller needs a person.
An answering service is a company or system that answers the calls a business cannot take itself, usually after hours, on weekends, or when the line is already busy.
Traditional services staff a call center with operators who read from a script and pass messages along. They usually bill per minute or per call, so a busy month costs more than a quiet one.
Lydoh runs as software on a flat monthly price: $199 a month for a practice, with unlimited calls and a 14-day free trial.
Call screening is finding out who is calling and why before deciding whether to take the call.
The screen asks the caller to say who they are and what they want, then reports back, and the person being called answers, declines, or reads it later. Screening judges one specific call rather than a number's reputation.
Lydoh screens unknown callers on a personal line and texts the owner what the caller wanted.
A call screening app is a phone app or service that answers unknown calls for you and shows you what the caller wants before you pick up.
Some run on the handset, like the screening built into certain phones, and work only on that device. Others answer on the line itself, so the screen happens before your phone rings and the handset makes no difference.
Lydoh screens on its own number, so there is nothing to install.
Spam filtering is blocking or labeling calls by a number's reputation, before anyone finds out what the caller wanted.
Carriers and apps score numbers from calling patterns and complaint data, then drop or mark the ones that look automated. It costs you no attention, but a wanted caller whose pattern looks wrong is filtered the same way, and you never learn what the call was about.
Screening is the other trade: every caller is heard out, and the record of what they wanted survives the call.
Message taking is writing down who called, how to reach them, and what they wanted, so that someone can call back.
A useful message is structured rather than recorded: a name, a working callback number, and a reason. That is the difference between a list a staff member can work through and a voicemail box somebody has to sit and listen to.
Lydoh writes each call into a structured record and texts the message to staff when the call ends.
An appointment request is a caller's ask for a specific time, captured in full but not yet booked.
The record holds the name, callback number, service, and preferred time, and a person confirms it against the real schedule. Leaving the booking with a person means no calendar integration is required and no software can double-book a day it cannot fully see.
Lydoh captures appointment requests and texts staff to confirm them. It has no calendar or email integration yet, by design.
A handoff is passing a live call from the assistant to a person, without the caller hanging up and dialing again.
It matters when a caller asks for a human, when the question sits outside what the assistant is allowed to answer, or when something is urgent. The alternative, telling a caller to try again later, is how calls get lost.
Lydoh hands off to a human line during business hours. On screen it is a handoff; out loud, Lydoh says it will connect you.
A knowledge base is the approved content an assistant is allowed to answer from.
Scoping answers to approved content is what stops an assistant guessing: if something is not in there, the correct behavior is to say so and take a message. Each business needs its own, because the true answer to a question like whether you take walk-ins is different in every building.
Each Lydoh workspace has its own knowledge base, and Lydoh answers only from that workspace's approved content.
After-hours and medical
The vocabulary of on-call coverage for clinical practices, where the job is to tell routine from urgent and reach a person for the urgent few.
After-hours answering is covering a phone line outside business hours, on nights, weekends, and holidays.
Most calls in those hours are routine and can wait for the morning. A few cannot, and the whole job is telling the two apart quickly and reaching somebody for the rest.
Lydoh answers around the clock on the same number, and medical practices get after-hours triage with escalation to the provider on call.
On-call escalation is reaching the person responsible for urgent matters outside business hours, and confirming that they got the message.
A text nobody reads is not coverage. Real escalation dials, waits for someone to acknowledge, moves to the next person when there is no answer, and records every attempt with a time on it.
Lydoh dials the provider on call, waits for acknowledgement, moves down the rotation when nobody answers, and keeps an audit log of every attempt.
An on-call rotation is the schedule that says which person covers urgent calls at a given hour.
Practices run them as a single provider, a weekly turn, or a fixed day of the week, then break the pattern for holidays and coverage swaps. The overrides matter more than the pattern, because exceptions are what actually happen.
Lydoh resolves the rotation when the call arrives, and holiday overrides always win over the regular pattern.
911 deflection is telling a caller with an emergency to hang up and call 911 before anything else happens on the call.
It goes first because every second spent taking a message is a second not spent getting help. It is a fixed instruction read to everyone, not a judgment about one caller's symptoms.
Every after-hours clinical call with Lydoh opens with the 911 reminder.
Telephone triage is sorting calls into urgent and routine so that the urgent ones reach somebody now.
Clinical triage by a nurse assesses symptoms against protocols and is licensed work. The safe version for software asks the caller whether the matter is urgent and routes on that answer, without assessing symptoms and without giving advice.
Lydoh lets the caller decide whether a matter is urgent or routine, and never gives medical advice.
A prescription refill request is a patient's ask to renew a medication they already take, captured for the practice to approve or deny.
A workable record has the patient, date of birth, medication, and pharmacy, which is what a staff member needs to look it up. Approval is a clinical decision and stays with the practice.
Lydoh takes refill requests for clinical practices into a structured queue, and never discusses dosing or promises approval.
A HIPAA Business Associate Agreement, or BAA, is a contract in which a vendor handling protected health information for a practice agrees to safeguard it and to report breaches.
Any vendor that touches patient information on a practice's behalf needs one. There is no such thing as HIPAA certification, so the signed agreement and the vendor's actual handling of data are what a practice can check.
A BAA is available for medical practices using Lydoh.
Call recording disclosure is telling the people on a call that it is being recorded, before the recording starts.
State laws differ: some require only one party to consent, and others require every party, which in practice means the caller has to be told. An announcement at the top of the call is the simple way to satisfy the stricter rule everywhere.
Lydoh speaks a recording disclosure at the start of every call by default, in wording the workspace controls.
Personal assistant
The words for an assistant that works for a person instead of a front desk, screening the calls they do not want and placing the ones they keep putting off.
A personal assistant, in the AI and phone-capable sense, is an assistant that works for one person rather than a business, and that both answers calls and places them.
The inbound half screens the calls a person does not want to take. The outbound half makes the calls they keep putting off, like booking a table or chasing a refund.
Lydoh's personal plan is $39 a month with up to 20 tasks a month and a 14-day free trial.
A task is one phone errand the assistant runs for you, defined by a goal, a target number, a time window, and a spending cap.
Those four bounds are what make an errand safe to delegate: the assistant knows what counts as done, who to call, when it may call, and how much it may agree to.
A Lydoh task calls inside its window and retries up to three times, between 9 and 6 Monday to Saturday in the owner's timezone. Lydoh reads the booking back before it hangs up, and never pays for anything.
VIP ring-through is letting chosen contacts skip the screen and ring you directly.
Screening everything is how a person misses the school, the clinic, or the contractor already standing at the door. A short list of people who always get through is what makes screening the rest tolerable.
A Lydoh contact marked VIP rings straight through while the owner is reachable.
What Lydoh remembers is the set of facts about the owner that the assistant keeps and reuses, each one confirmed by the owner before it is used.
A fact picked up on a call, like a usual table or a plate number, stays unconfirmed until the owner reviews it. Requiring that review stops a mishearing from becoming something the assistant repeats to a stranger.
Only confirmed facts are read into a Lydoh outbound call.
Digital assistant disclosure is an assistant saying plainly that it is an assistant, so that nobody on the call believes they are talking to a person.
It is the floor for placing calls on somebody's behalf. Being told up front changes a call far less than finding out afterwards.
Lydoh's outbound task calls open with “this is Lydoh, calling on behalf of {name}”, and Lydoh never claims to be a person.
FAQ
Lydoh is an AI phone assistant made by VoiceboxMD that answers calls 24/7 on a dedicated number, answers only from the content a workspace has approved, and captures appointment requests, messages, and refill requests for the people it works for.
No: Lydoh is software that says it is an assistant on every call, never claims to be a person, and hands a caller off to a human line during business hours.
Lydoh is made by VoiceboxMD, which builds phone software for medical practices, med spas, salons, and individuals.
How to cite this page: Lydoh Glossary, VoiceboxMD, https://lydoh.com/glossary. Every definition links to its own anchor, so a single term can be cited on its own.
Last reviewed: September 2026
Fourteen days free. Your own number in minutes. Private by default, with a BAA for medical practices.