Four faults on the phone line are fixed, and together they were the difference between a call working and a call being abandoned. Saying a time the ordinary way now books it. “Can you do ten thirty?”, “nine thirty”, “two thirty”, “ten fifteen” — none of these were understood, so callers were read the same times again or asked for a date they had already given. Only the 24-hour form, “seventeen thirty”, worked. The assistant no longer interrupts itself. It had been saying “Sure.”, “Right.” or “Let me check.” on almost every turn and then talking over it a fraction of a second later, which is what made replies sound clipped and garbled — it even did it when a caller had only said their name. It remembers the whole call now, not just the last few exchanges, so it stops asking for a name it has already been told and keeps the time you agreed while you ask about something else. And it no longer reads punctuation codes aloud: apostrophes saved in your services list could turn into stray characters that the assistant spoke out and, in one case, treated as the name of a service. Existing details have been corrected automatically.
You can also now book any time in the diary, not just the next few days. Times were drawn from a fixed-size pool rather than by date, so on a busy timetable the list ran out part-way through the seventh day — anything after that was reported as unavailable, and asking for an evening a week or more ahead returned that day’s afternoon instead. Dates said out loud in full (“the twentieth of August”) are understood now too; previously only “the 20th” was, and a spoken date could be quietly replaced with the nearest one, so you could be told one date and written down for another. Asking for a time in the evening also no longer comes back “we’re closed then” when the diary is open.