Yes. Bolt always tells your caller it’s a smart assistant, right up front. It never pretends to be something it’s not. Some pros worry that upfront disclosure will scare callers off. In practice, most callers care more about getting a fast, helpful answer than about who’s on the other end. Bolt is built to be useful in the first ten seconds, not to trick anyone.

Some will. A few callers hang up on anything that isn’t a person, and no setting changes that. But the real comparison isn’t Bolt versus you. It’s Bolt versus your voicemail while you’re under a sink.

Bolt answers in your business’s name, introduces itself as your smart assistant, and if a caller asks, tells them it’s an AI. It speaks English or Spanish, depending on how the caller starts talking. Every call shows up in the Calls tab with a summary and transcript, including the ones that hung up, so you can call those people back yourself.

Bolt’s smart assistant is trained to recognize the calls that can’t wait. No heat or no A/C, carbon monoxide fumes, flooding or water damage, a burst pipe, a sparking outlet, and similar serious situations. When a call like that comes in, Bolt gets the details and escalates it to you right away: a push notification, then a text, then an automated call if you still haven’t seen it. What Bolt doesn’t do is make the judgment calls that need your expertise on site. It’s built to flag and get you moving fast, not to diagnose or promise a timeline your customer can hold you to.

No. You keep your number, whatever number you already give out to customers. Most pros run their business off their cell phone, so Bolt is built around that: you forward your existing number to your smart assistant, the same way you’d forward calls to voicemail. No separate business line required. You can turn forwarding off anytime by dialing a code.

Your first 30 days are free, and the next 1 month is discounted. To start, you verify a card. Bolt places a temporary $1 hold that’s returned automatically, and your card isn’t charged during the trial. On day 30 your monthly subscription starts automatically. It’s month to month, with no annual contract.

Your plan includes a monthly amount of call minutes and texts. Extra use is billed at the rates shown when you sign up and on your Subscription screen, where you can check your usage anytime. See current pricing.

You keep your own phone number the whole time, because Bolt works by forwarding your calls. To stop, delete your account in Settings → Subscription. You keep service until the end of the period you’ve paid for.

About 10 minutes, start to finish, right from your phone. No laptop required. You can do it when you’re at the pump.

Delete your account in Settings → Subscription and your smart assistant keeps answering until the end of the period you’ve paid for. After that, the service stops, and your account and all its data are erased for good.

One thing doesn’t happen automatically: Your calls keep forwarding to Bolt’s number until you turn forwarding off with your carrier, so turn it off when your service ends. Go to Settings → Call Forwarding and tap the deactivate forwarding button to turn off forwarding with your phone company.

Bolt’s smart assistant captures what you’d want to know before calling someone back: name, callback number, address, what’s going on, and how urgent it is. And every single call comes with a full transcript, so if anything’s unclear or incomplete, you can see exactly what was said and fill in the gap yourself. Nothing’s hidden behind a summary you have to trust blindly.

Before Bolt offers a time, it checks when you’re busy on your main Google Calendar, plus your work hours, your time off, and the gap you set between jobs. If two callers try to book the same time, the first one gets it and the second is offered a different time. Right before it books, Bolt checks your calendar once more for that exact time.

You can read the summary and full transcript of every call, and change or cancel any job from your schedule. If Bolt can’t reach your calendar, it doesn’t guess. It takes the caller’s details so you can call them back.

A human answering service works, but it can cost over $1,000 per month and the receptionists can be off the clock sometimes too. Bolt is 24/7/365, provides you summaries and detailed transcripts of every call, and costs a fraction.

Other answering services either don’t know your business or they can cost thousands of dollars per year and require you to buy a bunch of software you don’t use (or want). Bolt gives our pros the tool they need to not miss a job and integrates with the tools they already use (phone, sms, email) to make sure they get Day One value.