An AI receptionist for clinics — built to hear as little as possible

Most of Australia's privacy law has a small-business exemption. Health is the hole in it: if your practice provides a health service and holds health information, the Privacy Act applies to you regardless of turnover, and in Victoria the state health-records law sits on top. That is not our obligation to carry for you — it stays with the practice — but it shapes how a phone service for you has to behave. Our answer is not clever paperwork. It is to make the receptionist unable to collect the sensitive part in the first place.

She won't discuss symptoms, conditions, diagnoses, medications, results, treatments or therapies — not to describe them, confirm them, guess at them, or even repeat back what a caller has said. If a patient starts explaining what's wrong, she lets them finish, says kindly that she's not the right person for the clinical side, and gets them to the practice.

Clinical detail is never written down. A message about a health matter records only that the caller would like a call back, plus their name and number. You ring them and hear it from them directly.

No health advice, of any kind. Not “that sounds fine”, not “that can wait”, not “you should come in”. If asked, she says plainly that she isn't qualified.

Nothing is kept at the voice provider. For restricted practices the call audio is not recorded at all, and the written transcript is deleted rather than kept. She will tell a caller exactly that if they ask.

Ordinary reception still works normally. Appointments, hours, location, parking, fees, cancellations and rescheduling — the actual job of a front desk.

A receptionist in restricted mode has one rule that outranks every other: if a caller describes anything that sounds like danger to life or limb, she stops whatever she was doing and tells them, immediately and plainly, to hang up and ring triple zero (000). She then hangs up herself so their line is free, and texts you at once with the caller's number and what they said. She does not ring 000 for them, and she will never say or imply that she has, or that help is on the way. She does not assess how serious it is — she is told to err heavily on the side of saying it.

This rule exists only in restricted mode. An ordinary Giday receptionist is not given it — a plumber's receptionist should never hang up on a caller who mentioned a burst pipe — and Giday is not an emergency service for any client.

She is not a triage line, a nurse, a clinical intake tool or a way to collect patient history over the phone. She is an AI receptionist who knows which conversations aren't hers. Every call also opens with the same short recorded notice every Giday client's callers hear — that they're speaking with an AI and the call is transcribed — and that notice can't be switched off, by us or by you. We think a patient is owed that sentence more than anyone.

Nothing here makes your practice's privacy obligations ours — they stay with you, as they would with a human receptionist or a call centre. What we can promise is that we have built her to hold as little as possible, we have written down exactly what she does, and if the rules change we will change her with them and tell you. If you want the detail, the recording-laws guide and our legal pages are the long version.