Greet every caller. Right away. With the right message.
Type a greeting, preview the AI voice, activate. Or upload your own audio. The auto-attendant answers before any user line rings — playing the right message based on hour, day, or holiday — and either routes the caller through to a person, an IVR menu, or voicemail. Included on Solo, Team Starter, and Team Pro.
Auto-attendant on Kelir.
An auto-attendant is the automated greeting that answers every inbound call to your business number before any individual user is rung. On Kelir it runs in the routing platform — the same UCaaS layer that handles working hours, hunt groups, and IVR — so the call is answered, evaluated, and routed within milliseconds of landing on the Kelir-Telnyx interconnect.
Setup is text-to-speech-first: type the greeting you want ("Thanks for calling Reeves Construction. Our office is closed for the weekend — please leave a message and we'll call you back Monday."), preview it in one of several US-English voices, and activate. Audio uploads are also supported if you've already produced a custom greeting in a studio.
The same feature on RingCentral, Dialpad, 8x8, and Vonage Business works the same way functionally — type or upload a greeting, attach time rules. The differences are delivery (Kelir's greeting plays before a cellular call rings on the user's eSIM, not before a softphone-app session is registered) and pricing (Kelir includes the auto-attendant on every plan including the single-seat Solo plan, where most softphone competitors require their mid-tier business plan before unlocking it).
Practically, the feature solves the universal small-business problem: a call comes in outside hours, or the line is busy, or you want to route to the right department — and you don't want the caller to feel like they reached an empty office or a personal voicemail. The auto-attendant gives every business — even a one-person shop — a professional inbound experience.
Setup walkthrough.
Configured from Mobile app. The setup below assumes a working Kelir account and an active eSIM.
- 1
Open the Kelir mobile app and tap Settings → Auto-attendant.
- 2
Toggle the auto-attendant on. Pick whether it plays before every call, only outside working hours, or only when the line is busy.
- 3
Compose the greeting. Type the text you want spoken; pick a voice from the dropdown (US-English neutral, warm, or formal); tap Preview to hear it.
- 4
Optionally upload an audio file (MP3 or WAV, up to 30 seconds) if you have a pre-produced greeting.
- 5
Set time-of-day rules: in-hours greeting, after-hours greeting, weekend greeting, holiday greeting. Each gets its own message.
- 6
Mark holidays for the year — Memorial Day, Thanksgiving, the long weekend in November. Each routes to the holiday greeting automatically on those dates.
- 7
Pick the post-greeting routing: ring the line, route to voicemail, route to a specific number (forwarding), or hand off to an IVR menu (Team plans).
- 8
Tap Activate. The next inbound call uses the new flow.
Where auto-attendant earns its keep.
Solo professional, after-hours boundary
Configured: 9–6 in-hours greeting ("You've reached Sarah Chen, leave a message and I'll call you back today"), 6–9 after-hours greeting ("Office is closed — for emergencies, text this number"). Solo professional, real boundary.
Contractor with crew dispatch
Configured: in-hours routes to crew dispatch hunt group, after-hours routes to a paging-service number, weekend routes to an emergency-only voicemail. One number, three different behaviors based on time.
Clinic with weekday hours and on-call
Configured: weekday greeting → reception, evening greeting → on-call provider hunt group, weekend greeting → covering provider's line, holiday greeting → emergency voicemail with paging-service number. Routes happen automatically by the calendar.
Agency with department routing
Configured: in-hours greeting hands off to a 3-option IVR menu (Press 1 sales, 2 client services, 3 finance). Each option routes to its department's hunt group. Auto-attendant is the front door; IVR is the directory.
Holiday week setup
Set in late October: Thanksgiving Wednesday afternoon → close-early greeting; Thursday and Friday → holiday-closed greeting; Monday → resume normal. Done in 5 minutes; runs automatically through the holiday.
The same feature.A real cellular line.
RingCentral, Dialpad, 8x8, Vonage Business, and Nextiva all ship a comparable auto-attendant. The functional surface is similar; the meaningful differences sit in delivery, plan availability, and what the caller experiences when the greeting hands off to a user.
- Greeting plays before a cellular ring on the user's eSIM — not before a softphone-app session that may or may not be active on the user's phone.
- Auto-attendant is included on Kelir Solo (single seat). Most softphone competitors require their mid-tier business plan ($25–35/seat range) before unlocking auto-attendant.
- Holiday overrides and per-day schedules are configurable from the mobile app, not just the web admin portal — useful when the office manager realizes the snow-day greeting still needs to switch.
- Greeting audio is delivered through the carrier voice path (VoLTE), not over the public internet to the caller's device. Same fidelity as a personal cellular call's audio.
- When the greeting routes to a hunt group or department, the call rings on real cellular eSIM lines — agents don't need an app open or a Wi-Fi connection to receive it.
- TTS voice preview is in-line in the app — type, hit Preview, hear it instantly. No render queue, no "build the audio" step.
Common questions
Yes. Auto-attendant is included on every Kelir plan — Solo, Team Starter, and Team Pro. Single-user features like auto-attendant aren't tier-gated on Kelir the way they often are on softphone UCaaS competitors.
Yes. Configure separate greetings for in-hours, after-hours, weekends, and holidays. Each runs automatically based on the working-hours schedule and holiday calendar you set. Per-day schedules (different hours Monday vs Saturday) are also supported.
Kelir uses US-English text-to-speech voices through the Kelir routing platform. Three voice options at launch: neutral, warm, and formal. Preview in the app before activating. If you prefer a human-recorded greeting, upload an MP3 or WAV up to 30 seconds.
Yes — on Team plans. The post-greeting routing options include: ring the line, route to voicemail, forward to a number, or hand off to an IVR menu ("Press 1 for sales, 2 for support…"). Multi-level IVR (sub-menus) is on Team Pro.
Yes — that's the entire point. The greeting plays in the Kelir routing platform before any user line is rung. Once the greeting completes (and any IVR selection is made), the call rings the destination user's cellular eSIM line.
If the busy-line rule is configured, the auto-attendant plays a different greeting ("All lines are busy — leave a message and we'll call you back") and routes to voicemail. Otherwise the call follows the standard busy-line behavior — call queuing on Team plans, voicemail on Solo.
Adjacent features.
Multi-level IVR
Press-1-for-sales menus that branch beyond a single greeting.
Working hours
Per-day schedules and holiday overrides that drive auto-attendant behavior.
Voicemail transcripts
Where missed calls land — every voicemail with text-by-email.