Meet Astra, your AI receptionist

Astra is Ody's AI receptionist: it answers calls on your business number with a natural voice, greets callers your way, handles the jobs you give it — like taking messages or answering questions from your business knowledge — and logs every call in your shared inbox.

What Astra can do

• Answer with your greeting, in a personality and tone you pick (Friendly, Professional, Concise, or Warm) and one of eight natural voices.
• Do jobs you define — take a message, answer questions, transfer to a human, or anything you describe in plain language. See Astra jobs: what it can do.
• Text callers mid-call — "Would you like me to text you our booking link?" Astra sends the exact message you wrote, from your business number, after the caller says yes. See Have Astra text callers during a call.
• Answer from your knowledge base — the hours, services, pricing, and policies you teach it. See Teach Astra about your business.
• Follow your schedule — answer 24/7, only during business hours, or only after hours while your team takes daytime calls. See When Astra answers vs. your team.
• Report back — each AI-handled call shows up in the inbox as an "AI agent handled this call" card with a transcript and summary.

Where to set it up

1. Click the AI agent icon in the left sidebar (on your phone, the AI tab).

2. If you run several agents you land on Your AI agents: one card per agent showing its status (Draft, Live, Off), its name, the number it answers calls on, its texting line, and how many jobs and actions it has. Click a card to open that agent. The Add another AI agent card creates a second one — see Add another AI agent. With a single agent you go straight into it; ‹ Your AI agents at the top left takes you back to the cards.

3. Inside an agent, the header has the Live / Off switch, Save draft and Publish. Under it, a status bar shows at a glance what is set up and what is missing — Published or Draft, the line it answers calls on, its texting line, its hours, how many knowledge articles it reads, and its jobs and actions. Amber chips mean something is missing; click any chip to jump to the section that fixes it.

4. The agent is organized into seven sections (a list on the left on desktop, scrolling chips on your phone):

   • Overview — the go-live checklist and a live picture of how calls and texts route today (numbers, hours, the agent, the fallback).
   • Identity — the agent's name, greeting, personality and voice.
   • Knowledge — the articles it answers from.
   • Skills — what it does on a call: jobs (what it handles in conversation) and actions (what it can do for the caller, like texting a link). The section opens with a short explainer of the difference.
   • Texting — let the agent answer the texts your numbers receive.
   • Schedule — the lines it answers and its working hours (the same editor as Settings → Work schedule). The status bar and the Overview checklist mark Give the agent a line as soon as you click Use schedule on a number.
   • Test call — how to hear Astra live before customers do.

5. Work through Identity, Knowledge and Skills, click Save draft, then Publish to make your setup live, and give the agent a line from Schedule (or Settings → Numbers).

The iOS app can also manage Astra — turn it on or off, edit the greeting and tone, set answering rules, and manage knowledge. The mobile apps show your first agent; additional agents are managed on the web.

The AI behind Astra keeps improving

Astra runs on a current-generation language model that Ody picks and maintains for you. When a stronger model becomes available, we test it and move every agent over automatically: your greeting, tone, knowledge, jobs and actions carry over exactly as you published them, there is nothing to click, and your plan and price do not change. We email you when a change is big enough to notice (the November 2026 upgrade, for example, made Astra noticeably quicker at understanding callers and following instructions). You never need to choose or configure a model.

Related articles

• Add another AI agent
• Turn Astra on or off
• Customize Astra's greeting and tone
• Test Astra with a test call
• Astra credits and usage