The dashboard calls the third one Warm Transfer with Tools; the API calls it
rich.
Start with warm. Move to warm-with-tools when the person answering keeps having to
look something up anyway.
Warm and rich call the person on your own number, so you need an outbound number
on your phone connection. Without one the transfer
still goes through — it just becomes a cold transfer, so the caller reaches a
person without the briefing.
Setting one up
Create a transfer tool under Tools and attach it to an assistant.
Destinations ring for 30 seconds before giving up. That’s adjustable over the API
but not in the dashboard.
One destination, or several
Set a destination and every transfer goes there. Leave it empty and fill in allowed destinations instead, and the assistant chooses — billing, or technical support, or the shift manager. It can only pick from that list, so it can’t dial a number you didn’t put there.What the caller hears
Just before handing over, the assistant tells the caller what’s happening — naming where they’re going, in the language it’s been speaking. You don’t write this line. The assistant knows what a fixed sentence can’t: who the caller is being put through to, and what they asked for a moment ago. It waits for the sentence to finish before transferring, so nobody is cut off mid-word.When a transfer doesn’t work
A transfer can fail because the line is busy, nobody answers in time, the person declines, or it reaches voicemail. By default the caller stays with your assistant, and the assistant is told which of those happened. That matters: “the line is busy” and “nobody picked up” lead to different things to say. It can offer to take a message, try another department, or explain the wait. Set if the transfer fails to end the call instead, and it apologises and hangs up.What the briefing says
For a warm transfer, the assistant writes a short handoff summary and speaks it to the person picking up. Summary instruction is what shapes it. The default asks for the caller’s latest request, the important context, and anything already done. Change it to match what your team needs to hear first:Adding data to the briefing
Warm with tools runs one or more of your tools before writing the summary, so it can include a ticket, an order or an account record. Add them as transfer context tools on the transfer. They only run at transfer time — the assistant can’t call them during the conversation — so a slow lookup that would be awkward mid-call is fine here. If one fails, the transfer still goes ahead with a shorter summary.Seeing transfers
A transfer appears in the call transcript like any other tool. To act on one in your own systems, subscribe to thecall.transferred webhook. It tells
you the type, the destination, and whether it worked.