What’s new in SIMCOAI.

The models, voices and speech engines now have names you can look up

There is a page for them: simcoai.co.uk/technology. The AI models that answer your phone are SIMCOAI Lite, Swift, Core, Insight and Live. The voices are SIMCOAI Voice Rapid, Natural, Studio and Signature. The speech engines that listen are SIMCOAI Speech Live, Precise and Standard. Each one says plainly what it is for, so choosing between them is a decision you can make rather than a guess.

Each name is a configuration we build and run — its own instructions, context routing, deadlines and guardrails — on top of a frontier base model. That is the part we control, which is why we can move to a better engine underneath without you having to re-choose anything or re-learn what you bought. We are not claiming to have trained a model from scratch, and we say so on the page.

The dashboard stopped showing you version strings. The voice readiness panel used to read like a list of other companies’ release notes; it names SIMCOAI Speech and SIMCOAI Voice now. Your usage rows say “speech minutes” and “voice minutes” rather than naming suppliers you never chose and cannot change.

Every provider we rely on is still named in full where it matters. Our privacy policy and GDPR page now carry a table mapping each SIMCOAI name to the company that actually processes that data, because naming who handles your customers’ information is a legal requirement rather than a presentational choice.

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Easier to find us, and better documentation when you get here

Sharing a SIMCOAI link now renders properly nearly everywhere. We named the crawlers that fetch a page for a link preview — the ones behind messages, posts and chats — alongside a further thirteen search and AI assistants, so a link to SIMCOAI shows a title, a description and an image rather than a bare address.

The AI models and voices documentation was rewritten around the names. It now lists every model and voice, what each is for, which profile selects which, and how the choice shows up on your bill. The account security page was brought up to date at the same time.

Update titles were colliding in search results. Three genuinely different updates all appeared under the same truncated headline, which search engines treat as duplicate content. Titles are now cut at a word boundary and only lengthened when being short would make two of them identical.

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The dashboard is simpler to move around, and there is a light mode

There is now a light mode. The sun in the top bar switches the whole dashboard between light and dark, and it remembers which you chose. If you had picked a colour theme, switching back to dark returns you to it rather than to the default.

Two pages in the menu had the same name in a different order. “AI Setup” and “Setup AI” are completely different pages and there was no way to tell them apart from the menu; they are now “Setup wizard” and “Setup assistant”. Eight entries all began with “AI” inside a group already called Your AI, so that prefix has gone and the part that actually tells them apart is what you read first.

Getting help has its own place in the menu. Contact us, Report a problem and Ask the guides were spread across two groups, one of them called “Platform”, which is not a word anybody looks under when they are stuck. Seven unfinished sections that were only ever placeholders have been taken out of the menu until they are ready.

Pressing a button no longer throws you to the bottom of the page. Anything that refreshed part of a page could jump you somewhere else entirely, so the control you had just pressed was no longer under the cursor. Pages now stay exactly where you left them.

The menu stays on screen now. The list of sections down the left used to scroll away with the page, so on a long page there was no way to move to another section without scrolling all the way back to the top first.

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A simpler Security page that tells you the one thing worth doing

Security is its own section in the menu. It was the tenth entry inside Account, which is a billing group — the wrong place to be hunting when you are worried about something.

Every two-step method now has a Set up button. There used to be two lists that looked identical: the methods you had actually set up, and the methods you were choosing between. Only the second had any controls, so a method you had merely picked looked exactly like one that was working. There is one list now, strongest method first, and each row tells you whether it is set up and carries the buttons that apply to it — Set up, Remove, Enable, Disable, and Move up to be asked for it before the others. Anything you have set up counts as enabled unless you disable it.

The page carried a row of seven ticks that told you very little. Four of them could never be anything but a tick, so most of it was a wall of green reporting things you could not act on, and the two rows that mattered were buried in it. What is left is the one sentence those ticks existed to produce, and it says what to do next.

Recent sign-ins are easier to read, passkeys sit with the rest of your sign-in settings rather than in a panel of their own, and the page is about a third shorter.

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You can find our phone number from any page now

Our support line is in the footer of every page. It was on the contact page and nowhere else, so you had to find that page first. Call +44 7576 569444 from anywhere on the site, or from the footer of the sign-in page if you cannot get in at all.

What the line does is written down properly. Our support and SLA page now lists the phone number alongside the other ways to reach us, and the telecoms policy explains what happens when you ring us: the line is answered by a digital assistant, the recording notice is read out and cannot be switched off, you can ask for a person at any point, and if nobody is free we take your number and ring you back rather than leaving you holding. It is a standard-rate number and never a premium one.

One correction while we were there. The contact page described sign-in codes by text. That option has been withdrawn — see the correction on the 13 August update — so it no longer says so.

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The pricing page shows you the plans straight away

You can now see the plans without scrolling. The pricing page opened with a large heading and no price anywhere on the first screen — you had to scroll before finding out what anything cost. All four plans, the most-popular marker and the monthly, six-month and yearly savings are now visible as soon as the page opens.

The small icons beside each plan’s allowances were also being squashed to about a quarter of their proper size and stretched out of shape. They render correctly again.

Some of the wording has been rewritten too. The short labels under each plan were written for us rather than for you — things like “Usage gated” and “Token budget” — and now say what you actually get, such as “Answers your phone”, “Takes bookings” and “5 phone numbers”.

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The Security page now tells you plainly whether two-step verification is on

It was possible to believe two-step verification was protecting your account when it was not. Choosing which methods you wanted and saving them looked like switching it on, and the page confirmed it with a cheerful “Saved”. It is a separate switch, and until you press it nothing is asked for at sign-in.

Three things caused that and all three are fixed. The list of methods you can choose from was drawn in the same style as the list of methods you have actually set up, so a method you had merely picked looked like one that was working — every method now says Set up or Not set up yet, and the two lists are labelled. Saving your choices now says in as many words that two-step verification is still off, if it is. And if you have a method ready with the switch off, the page leads with exactly that, instead of a line that reads as though you were finished.

The wording when you turn it on was wrong too. It said you would set a method up the next time you signed in — that used to be true and was deliberately removed, because offering to add a second factor at the sign-in screen would let anybody who had your password add one of their own. Methods are set up from the dashboard while you are signed in, and the message says so now.

Nothing about sign-in itself was broken. We checked it end to end: with two-step verification on, signing in asks for the second step, and asks again on a fresh sign-in after signing out. If yours is off, the Security page will now say so clearly.

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You stay signed in for 30 days instead of 7

Signing in now keeps you signed in for 30 days rather than a week. If you have been asked to sign in again more often than you expected, that is why.

The longer sign-in was already built and simply was not being used: when the old sign-in page was replaced earlier this month, the part that asked to be remembered went with it, and every session quietly fell back to seven days. Nothing looked wrong — you were just signed out sooner than intended.

Signing out still ends the session immediately, on every device it covers, and if you use two-step verification you are still asked for it each time you sign in afresh.

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The SIMCOAI support line answers the common questions instantly

Ring SIMCOAI support and the everyday questions are now answered straight away rather than after a pause. Asking how to reset a password, where invoices are, how to cancel, how to get set up, or how two-step verification works used to mean waiting two to three seconds in silence. Those answers now come back in a fraction of a second.

The reason for the wait was that the line worked every answer out from scratch and then had to put it into speech before you heard anything — on questions whose answer never changes. Those answers are now ready before you ring.

It can also do more. It can tell you how to set up two-step verification and what to do if you have lost the phone your codes are on, where to find invoices and update a declined card, how cancelling works, and what to check first if your receptionist is not answering calls — and during an incident it will tell you that instead. Asking to speak to a person now puts you through straight away, rather than telling you which button to press; pressing 2 still works at any point.

Anything outside that is still a proper conversation, so the line has not become a menu.

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Two-step verification now really does ask for the second step

If you switched two-step verification on, signing in did not actually ask for it. Your email address and password alone still got you in, while the Security page said the account was protected. That is the wrong way round for a security setting, and it is fixed.

Two things were behind it. The sign-in was checking whether you had a method set up in a way that did not recognise modern ones, so it skipped the second step. And a passkey was being counted as a second step when it is not one — a passkey signs you in on its own, in place of a password, rather than adding anything on top of it.

Now: two-step verification always asks when it is on, it can only be switched on once you have set up a real second method (an authenticator app, a security key, or this device), and removing your last method switches it off rather than leaving it on and unable to ask. No account was left switched on and unprotected, and passwords, passkeys and emailed sign-in codes were unaffected throughout.

Recovery codes can now be saved. The Security page described them for a long time without ever giving you one. You can now generate a recovery code, copy it or download it, and keep it somewhere safe — it is what gets you back in if you lose the phone holding your authenticator.

The page also stopped jumping to the bottom every time you pressed something, and no longer stops loading if you or a colleague open it a few times in a row.

Open your Security page

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See every sign-in to your account, and sign out everywhere

Your Security page now shows the recent activity on your account. Every sign-in, wherever it happened — not only in this browser — with the date and time, the kind of device, the country and the address it came from. Failed attempts and password resets are listed too, so you can tell an ordinary week from one that needs looking at.

There is a Sign out everywhere button beside it. It ends every other signed-in device on your account and leaves you signed in where you are, which is what you want if you have lost a laptop or think somebody else has your password. If your account has been temporarily locked after repeated failed attempts, the page now says so and offers to clear it, instead of leaving you wondering why your password stopped working.

Two-step verification has also been added to the list of protections at the top of the page, so you can see at a glance whether it is on. Nothing about how you sign in has changed, and you do not need to do anything.

Open your Security page

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The sign-in page now looks like the rest of SIMCOAI

The page you sign in on had drifted away from the rest of the site. It was laid out as two panels split by a line down the middle of the screen, with its own heading sizes and its own shade of background — so arriving there from the pricing or features page felt like being handed to somebody else. That matters more on a sign-in page than anywhere else, because a page that does not look like the product it belongs to is exactly what people are told to be suspicious of.

It now uses the same layout, headings and spacing as every other page on the site. Its footer had also fallen behind and was missing our TikTok link; it is generated from the same source as every other page again, and a new check compares the published page against that source so it cannot quietly fall behind a second time.

Nothing about signing in has changed — the same methods, the same address, the same account.

Sign in to SIMCOAI

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Appointment times are heard, and read back, correctly

Some ordinary ways of saying a time were being booked as a different time. A caller who said “half past seven in the evening” could be booked for half past seven in the morning. “Five past nine” could become five o’clock. A time said or written with a full stop, like 3.30pm, could become three o’clock. And “twenty to one” was treated as twenty to one at night, so callers asking for a lunchtime appointment were told the business was closed.

In each case nothing looked wrong at the time: a sensible-sounding time was repeated back and confirmed, so the first anyone would know was somebody arriving at the wrong hour.

The assistant was also saying some times wrongly. An evening appointment could be read out as a morning one, and a business opening at six in the morning had its early slots offered in a way that came back as six in the evening.

Separately, a business open late was telling callers it was closed when it was not. A shop open until eight in the evening, asked for half past seven, said it was closed. It now explains that it cannot start an appointment that late and offers the nearest times instead — which keeps the booking rather than sending the caller away.

All of this is fixed. Callers can say a time in whatever way comes naturally and be booked for the time they said. Businesses that open early or stay open into the evening were the most affected; a business working ordinary daytime hours would not have seen it.

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Footer social buttons now link to TikTok, YouTube and X

The footer now uses compact icon buttons for SIMCOAI's social channels, including the new TikTok profile. Screen reader labels stay in place, while the visible footer stays cleaner on phones, docs and update pages.

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The SIMCOAI support line answers faster, sounds like SIMCOAI, and can do more than talk

It has a real voice now. The support line used to answer in a basic computer voice. It now uses the same natural voice as the receptionist itself, and because the things it says on every call are prepared in advance, it answers straight away rather than pausing to think.

It is quicker throughout. The menu responds in a fraction of the time it used to, and one-word answers like “two” or “a person” are picked up as soon as you finish saying them instead of after a pause.

Three things it can now actually do, rather than just discuss. It will tell you whether SIMCOAI is having a problem right now, checked live rather than guessed. It will text you a link to the page you need, sent to the phone you are calling from — far easier than being read a web address. And it can tell you what the plans cost.

It knows when to let you go. Saying “that’s everything, goodbye” or “ok, bye then” now ends the call properly — before, some ways of saying goodbye left the line open. Calls also have a sensible maximum length, and anything that reaches it is passed to a person with a callback rather than simply cut off.

Pressing 2 still reaches a person at any point, and it always will.

Contact SIMCOAI

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Signing in no longer offers to create a new way into your account

Until today, anyone who signed in with your email address and password was offered the chance to create a passkey on their own device. A passkey is a full way of signing in, not an extra check — so if your password had ever been guessed or reused from somewhere else, whoever had it could have given themselves a second, separate way in. Changing your password would not have removed it.

That offer is gone. New ways of signing in are now set up only from Security in your dashboard, where you are already signed in. Passkeys you already have are unaffected and still work — “Use a passkey” is still on the sign-in page.

We have no evidence of this being used against any account. It was a gap in how the sign-in page was set up rather than something that had gone wrong, and we found it while working through the sign-in screen.

How signing in to SIMCOAI works

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The sign-in page now looks like the rest of SIMCOAI, and tells you when your security settings change

The sign-in page had drifted away from the rest of the site. Its footer was spaced differently, the social links were the wrong weight, the text sat on a slightly different background in a slightly different typeface, and the email box was a different shape and a brighter blue than every other field in the product. Small things, but together they made the page somebody trusts with their password look like it belonged to a different company.

It is now built from the same header, footer and stylesheet as every other page, rather than from a copy that had to be kept in step by hand. When the site changes, the sign-in page changes with it.

You will also be emailed whenever two-step verification is switched on or off, or one of your methods is removed. Those changes can be made from any signed-in session, so if one is ever made without you, the email is how you find out while there is still time to act. It is a security notice and cannot be unsubscribed from.

Two-step verification now offers the strongest methods first — your fingerprint or face, then an authenticator app, then a security key, with a code by text last, since a text can be intercepted if your number is taken over.

Sign in

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Two-step verification is available, and you choose which methods you use

You can now add a second step to signing in, from Security in your dashboard. It means somebody who has your password still cannot get into your account. It is off unless you turn it on, and turning it off again never needs anyone’s permission but yours.

You pick the methods, and the order. Choose any of an authenticator app, your fingerprint or face, a physical security key, or a code by text — and turn off the ones you do not want offered. Whichever you put first is the one you are asked for first; the rest are there as a fallback. If you only want an authenticator app, that is the only thing you will be shown.

Recovery codes are always included and cannot be switched off. Losing your phone should not mean losing your account, so you will always be offered codes to save or print.

Turning a method off changes what you are offered when setting one up — it never stops you using something you have already set up, so you cannot accidentally lock yourself out from this screen. To stop using one for good, remove it from the same page.

A passkey remains the quickest and safest option and still works on its own. If you already use one, you are covered.

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Signing in with a text code did not work, and we have taken the option away until it does

If you chose “Text me a sign-in code” on the sign-in page, you were sent a code, the code was accepted, and you were then told we could not finish signing you in. There was no way through it and nothing you could have done differently. We are sorry — that is a bad thing to meet at the front door.

The cause was on our side and it was not specific to your account. Sending and checking the code worked correctly the whole time; what was missing is the step that connects a phone number to a SIMCOAI account. No account has a phone number recorded against it yet, and there is no way to add one, so that sign-in method could not have worked for anybody.

The option has been removed from the sign-in page rather than left there to fail. Signing in with your email address, with a code sent to your email, and with Google all work exactly as before and were never affected. If you are stuck, use your email address.

A correction, and an apology. Our first fix removed the option, which stopped anyone new from hitting it — but it did nothing for people who had already signed in that way. If you had, your browser was still holding a sign-in session for your phone number, and pressing “Try signing in again” quietly reused it instead of showing you the sign-in form, so it failed again straight away, every time. Signing out did not clear it either, because the sign-out link pointed at a page we retired earlier this month that sent you back into signing in. Both are fixed: retrying now always shows you the sign-in form, and signing out genuinely signs you out. If you are still on the error page, reload it once and press “Try signing in again”.

We will bring sign-in by text back once you can add and confirm a phone number on your account from the Security page, so the code arrives somewhere we can actually match to you. No account was changed, no sign-in details were exposed, and nothing was recorded against your account by the failed attempts.

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A tidier sign-in page, and headings in your dashboard that follow the page

In your dashboard, the heading on every card was larger than the title of the page it sat on. Section headings measured 34px against a 27px page title, so on most screens the first thing your eye landed on was a card rather than the page you had opened, and one heading on the overview wrapped across three lines inside its card. Titles now step down properly — page, then section, then card — so a screen reads in the order it is meant to. Nothing moved or changed name; only the sizes.

The sign-in page has been rebuilt. It carried a large empty gap down the middle, three separate introductions that all said the same thing, and a “Can’t log in?” link set as boldly as the Continue button beside it. The page is balanced now, it introduces itself once, and the recovery link reads as the fallback it is.

On a phone it opened with seven navigation links stacked above the form. That is gone: the sign-in box is the first thing you see, and every one of those links is still in the footer.

The panel beside the form now shows an example of a call your receptionist handles, rather than an illustration of a dashboard.

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The search box at the top of your dashboard works when you click it

Clicking the search box did nothing at all. It sat at the top of every page inviting you to search your commands, calls, orders and refunds, and pressing it had no effect — the only way to open it was the Ctrl K keyboard shortcut, which is not something anybody would guess. It now opens when you click it, as it always should have.

Even by keyboard it was opening somewhere you could not see. The search panel was being drawn below the entire length of the page rather than over it, so it appeared to do nothing then as well. It now opens centred over the page, with the box already focused so you can type straight away.

Two smaller things went with it. When you type a customer’s name on an order, refund, booking or escalation form near the bottom of the screen, the matching customers could open just below the visible area — we had found them and you could not see them. The list now scrolls itself into view. And confirmation messages raised from inside a dialog were appearing behind that dialog instead of on top of it.

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Blocking out an hour no longer closes your whole day to callers

If you blocked out any part of a day — an hour for a team meeting, a lunch break, an afternoon off — your receptionist told callers the entire day was closed. Every appointment on that day was being turned away, and it happened without any sign that something was wrong: the answer was confident and sounded correct.

It could contradict itself inside one call. On a business open nine to half five with an hour blocked out in the evening, a caller was offered three morning appointments and then, one turn later, told that same morning was unavailable. The morning was genuinely free; the closure was hours away and outside opening hours entirely.

Your receptionist now works out how much of the day a closure actually covers. A closure that covers the whole working day still means the day is closed, and it says so with your reason. A closure covering part of it means the day is bookable except for that period, and the times offered already leave it out. A closure that falls outside your opening hours affects nothing and is no longer mentioned at all.

It also understands a day named on that same day. A caller ringing on a Friday who says “Friday at ten” about a time just read out to them meant today, and was being understood as the following Friday. Saying “next Friday” or “a week on Friday” still means the week after, as it should.

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The sign-in page now looks like the rest of SIMCOAI, and you can sign in with a code by text

The sign-in page had no navigation and no footer. Once you reached it there was no way back to pricing, the docs, the status page or anything else without using the browser’s back button — it looked like a different site. It now carries the same header and footer as every other SIMCOAI page, built from the same source, so a link added anywhere on the site appears there too. Those links open in a new tab on purpose: a sign-in in progress is only valid once, and wandering off in the same tab would have meant starting again.

You can now sign in with a code sent to your mobile. There is a “Text me a sign-in code” option on the sign-in page. Choose it, enter your number, and the code arrives by text instead of email — useful if your email is slow or you are already on your phone.

Typing a phone number used to lead nowhere. The sign-in box invited a phone number and then asked for a password, which nobody has against a phone number, so it was a dead end. The box now asks for your email address and the code-by-text option is a separate button that works.

Correction, 17 August 2026: sign-in by text has been withdrawn. It could not sign anybody in — the code was sent and accepted, and the last step then failed, because no account had a mobile number recorded against it and there was no way to add one. Rather than leave a button that cannot work, we have removed it. Signing in by email, by an emailed code, with Google, with a password or with a passkey all work as before, and we would rather add a phone as a second step after your password than as a way in on its own — a number can be moved to another SIM, and that should never be enough to reach your account.

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Menus in your dashboard no longer disappear behind the search bar

Any menu that opened near the top of a page in your dashboard was covered by the bar holding the search box. The customer picker on order, refund and booking forms was the one you would hit most often: start typing a customer’s name, and the list of matches could open underneath the search bar where you could neither read nor click it.

It affected every drop-down in every section, at every window size, and no amount of scrolling helped — the bar stays at the top of the page by design, and menus were being drawn behind it rather than in front.

Fixed. Menus now open in front of the bar, and the bar still covers the page as you scroll, which is what it is there for.

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A simpler Security page that tells you the one thing worth doing

The Security page was long, repetitive, and warned you about things that were not wrong. Two of its six checks could never pass: it reported that your session was not remembered and showed a “Missing token” badge — while you were signed in and working normally — and it said your terms had not been accepted, when you could not have reached the page without accepting them. The score was stuck below full for everyone, which is the fastest way to teach people to ignore a security page.

It now checks things that are true and that you can act on, and it names the single most useful next step at the top with the control to do it — usually adding a passkey, which cannot be phished, guessed or reused. Panels that were only ever useful to us have gone: a raw data dump, a diagnostics tool and a card describing infrastructure you do not control.

“Manage sign-in security” did nothing. It opened the sign-in page in a new tab, which for someone already signed in simply completed and returned them to the dashboard. Adding a passkey has always been possible on the Security page itself, so that is where the button now takes you.

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Ampersands show as & again, not as code

A few headings in your dashboard printed the characters “&” where an ampersand belonged. It appeared on the Account & Company heading and on two panels on the Security page. Nothing was broken behind it — the text was simply being converted for safe display twice over, so the conversion itself became visible.

Fixed, and there is now a check that fails the build if it is ever reintroduced.

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Your receptionist quotes the right closing time for the right day

If one day of your week runs to a different time from the others, callers could be told the wrong one. Asked what time you close, your receptionist was reading your opening hours as a block and could quote the time most of your days end at rather than the time that particular day ends at. On a business open late one evening a week, that is the evening customers were told you were already shut.

The hours for the day being asked about are now worked out before your receptionist answers, so it quotes that day's line and no other — whether the caller asks about today or names a day. Tested against a business open later on Thursdays than the rest of the week, it now gets it right every time.

Where a caller is asking about an appointment rather than the door being open, your bookable timetable still governs, and your receptionist says so instead of promising a slot.

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Interrupting your receptionist works straight away again

Callers had to speak more firmly, and for longer, than they should have before the assistant would stop talking. The setting that decides how readily a caller can cut in had been turned down below the platform's own normal level, to stop background noise and a caller's own “mm-hm” from interrupting. It did stop those, and it also made genuine interruptions feel slow — you had to talk over your receptionist for a moment before it noticed.

It is back to the most responsive setting. The noise problem is handled where it belongs instead: short acknowledgements like “yeah”, “okay” and “mm-hm” are filtered out from the caller's audio, so agreeing with your receptionist no longer stops it mid-sentence while genuinely cutting in does — immediately.

Nothing changes about the opening notice: the recording disclosure at the start of every call still cannot be interrupted, and that is deliberate.

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Sign-in codes sent by text now arrive however busy it gets

Sign-in codes sent to your mobile could stop being delivered during a busy period, with nothing to tell you why. A limit meant to slow down abusive traffic was being applied to the step that hands the code to our messaging system. Because every one of those requests comes from the sign-in service rather than from your browser, they all counted against a single shared allowance — so once roughly forty codes had been sent across all customers within a quarter of an hour, the next person to ask for one simply never received it.

That limit no longer applies to code delivery. The protections that actually matter are unchanged and were never the problem: there are still ceilings on how many messages any one number can receive, a daily cap on messages overall, and premium-rate and satellite ranges remain blocked outright.

We also shortened how long an internal delivery request stays valid and made each one single-use, so a request that is intercepted cannot be reused to send further messages.

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The reviews section says what it means, once

We have no customer reviews yet, and the site was saying so four times over. On the home page and the pricing page the largest text on the section announced that reviews would appear here eventually, above a panel whose own heading said there were none, above a sentence explaining that the first ones were still to come. It was all true and it read as an apology.

It now says it once, at the size of an ordinary status note, and the space that was empty carries the three things that will make those reviews worth reading: we never write our own or pay for any, nothing is hidden or reordered by rating, and the verified mark is set from the account rather than by whoever is writing.

The reviews page itself was harder to read than that. Its explanation was being squeezed into a column about sixty pixels wide, a word or two per line, with the button sitting over it. That is fixed too.

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Upload links ask for the right thing, and the panel that makes them is tidier

The secure upload page asked customers for “photos, receipts or documents” while only accepting photographs. Anyone who tried to send a receipt as a PDF was turned away, at the point in a refund where being given the wrong instruction is least welcome. The page now asks for a photo of the item, the damage or the receipt, and says so consistently — and the upload symbol is a proper icon rather than a character that rendered differently on every device.

In your dashboard, the Proof & evidence panel had no inside margin at all, so its heading, the recipient box and the Create upload link button sat hard against the edge of the panel and the button looked cut off. It is spaced properly now.

The guided tour was also appearing on top of any dialog you opened, covering part of it. Dialogs now sit above the tour, and confirmations still appear above both.

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You can now ring SIMCOAI and speak to somebody

SIMCOAI has a support line. Ring it and you are asked to press 1 for help with your account or 2 to speak to a person. Press 1 and you reach an assistant that can talk you through signing in, resetting a password, what is on your plan and how billing works. Press 2, at the menu or at any point afterwards, and you are put through to somebody on the team.

If nobody is free, you are not left with nothing. Rather than ringing out, the line takes your number and puts you in a callback queue that a person works through, and it tells you that is what has happened. The same thing happens if the call reaches a person and they cannot pick up in time.

The line opens with a notice that you are speaking to a digital assistant and that the call may be recorded, before anything else happens. That notice is part of the platform and cannot be switched off.

It never asks for a password, a sign-in code or card details, and it will not discuss anything specific about your account, because it has no way to confirm who is calling. Anything of that kind goes to a person.

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Sign-in codes can now be sent by text instead of email

You can choose where your six-digit sign-in code goes. Email still works exactly as it did. If you would rather have it as a text message, you can now use your mobile number instead — useful if your email is slow to arrive, or if you are signing in from a phone and would rather not switch apps.

Codes are sent from SIMCOAI, through the same protections as everything else we send. The code itself is never written into our own records, there is a firm limit on how many can be sent to one number in an hour, and premium-rate and satellite ranges are refused outright — those exist to stop somebody running up a bill by asking for codes they never intend to use.

Replying to one of those texts now gets an answer pointing you at somewhere useful, and replying STOP stops them. Before this, a reply reached nothing at all.

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Photo upload links now say which order they are about

When your customer opens a secure upload link, it now names the order. The page already named your business and said whether it was about a refund or an order; it should also have shown the order reference, and it never did on a link created from your dashboard or by your receptionist on a call. A page asking somebody to send photographs is easier to trust when it can say exactly what it is for.

The page also stopped asking for a file type we do not accept. It said “photos or PDFs” while only photographs could actually be uploaded, so a customer sending a receipt as a PDF was turned away at the last step. It now says what is genuinely accepted, the file picker filters to match, and it shows the size limit.

Existing upload links are unaffected and keep working. Nothing about who can open a link, or how long it lasts, has changed.

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The parts of SIMCOAI now have SIMCOAI names

What you buy from us is now named after what it does. Calling, Voice, Speech, Messaging, Payments, Identity and Intelligence are the parts of SIMCOAI, and the models your receptionist runs on are SIMCOAI Swift, Core and Insight — named for the choice you are actually making, which is how fast an answer comes back against how much thought goes into it.

Nothing about your service changes. This is what things are called, not what they do. The same voices, the same speech recognition and the same models are behind them.

Our legal pages still name every company that processes your data. The privacy policy, the GDPR page, the terms and the cookie policy list our sub-processors by name and always will — that is a legal requirement and the one place where naming them matters more than tidiness.

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Refund approval now works the same way everywhere, and your review setting is honoured

Earlier today we fixed refunds being approved on a phone call without anyone checking. That fix did not cover every route in, and this one does. Refunds filed from your dashboard, or sent in by an integration through the API, were still being marked as refunded automatically on the same setting — the one labelled “create refund logs automatically”, which says in its own description that your receptionist never moves money itself. Recording a refund and approving one are now separate permissions on every route, using one shared rule rather than two that could drift apart.

If your account was set to review refunds, that is now honoured. Some accounts carry an older “review” setting from a previous version of the setup wizard. It was being read by almost nothing, so it could say review while a refund was approved. Where that setting exists and says review, refunds are recorded for your team and never approved automatically — whatever the other switches say. Accounts without it are unaffected.

Businesses that never set a trading name were being called “Your business”. That is the placeholder we fill in at signup, and it was appearing where customers could see it — including in the greeting callers hear, so some callers were told “you are through to Your business”. It is no longer shown as if it were a real name anywhere, and your dashboard now asks you to set one, since a real name is what your callers should hear.

One smaller thing on calls. If a caller started with a refund and then decided to book an appointment instead, your receptionist could still ask for an order number while confirming the appointment — a leftover from the earlier request that sent people hunting for something a booking never needed. It now asks only for what the booking actually needs.

Refund settings

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Bookings now survive the whole call, including the part that finishes them

A booking could stop working part-way through a call and never be created. The caller agreed a day and time, gave their email, read the six-digit code back — and nothing was saved. Your receptionist said it would verify the code and submit the request, but the code was never actually checked and no booking appeared in your dashboard. The caller rang off believing they had an appointment.

Two things had to go wrong together, and both were about your receptionist losing track of what the call was for. If a caller started with one thing and switched to another — asking about a refund, then deciding to book instead — the earlier subject could pull the conversation back, so a request for “a week today at three” was answered with today’s times. And once the caller answered a question in ordinary words, your receptionist could decide the call was now a general enquiry; from that point on, the turns that actually finish a booking — an email address, a “yes”, a string of digits — no longer counted as being about the booking at all.

This hit dental and medical practices hardest, and for an unfortunate reason. Describing a symptom was being read as a general health question rather than as the reason for the appointment, so on those businesses the most useful thing a caller could say was the thing most likely to derail the booking.

What happens now. Once a booking is under way it stays under way until it is finished or the caller plainly changes their mind. Saying what an appointment is for keeps you in the booking. Changing your mind still works exactly as before — asking for a refund, a manager or something else entirely switches straight away — and a genuine question is still answered as a question rather than being pulled into the form.

How bookings work

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Refunds are no longer approved without someone checking

On a phone call, a refund could be marked approved before anyone at your business had looked at it. It needed the refund to be at or under the approve limit you had set, and it happened even on accounts set to review refunds by hand — and even where the written refund policy said not to approve without proof. The caller was told the refund had been approved and the amount, and the order was updated to match.

What went wrong. The switch labelled “create refund logs automatically” was also being read as permission to approve them. That switch says, in its own description, that your receptionist records a refund for your team to approve and never moves money itself. That is what it should always have meant.

What happens now. Recording a refund and approving one are separate permissions. Approving on the call is off unless you deliberately switch it on, and there is a new setting for it in your Policy Centre with the consequences spelled out. Your own refund policy comes first either way: if it says refunds need proof, a manager, or a case-by-case look, requests are logged for your team and never approved on the call, whatever the switches say.

If you want to check your own account, open Policy Centre and look at “approve refunds without a person checking”. It is off unless you turn it on.

Refund settings

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Customers describing damage now get a photo upload link

A caller could say the item arrived broken and never be sent a link to send photographs. On the Pro plan your receptionist is meant to email a secure upload link when somebody describes damage, so your team has the evidence before deciding. It was not happening on phone calls at all.

What went wrong. Your receptionist was recording the wrong sentence as the reason for the refund. The caller explains what happened early in the call — “it was broken on arrival” — but the refund was written down a few turns later, after the order number and the email, and it saved whatever the caller happened to be saying at that moment. That was usually them reading a verification code back. The check that decides whether to send an upload link reads the reason, so by the time it looked, the word “broken” had been replaced by a string of digits.

What happens now. The reason saved against a refund is what the caller actually said went wrong, taken from the moment they said it, and it is not overwritten by anything they say afterwards. Upload links go out on calls where somebody describes damage, and the reason shown in your dashboard reads like an explanation instead of a code.

How refunds work

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Refund calls ask what happened, and keep the customer’s address private

Saying “I would like to make a refund” sent a verification code straight away. No order number, no question about what had gone wrong. Your receptionist was treating the request itself as the explanation, so it believed the caller had already said everything it needed. Asking for a refund is not a reason for one, and it is not treated as one now: the caller is asked which order and what happened, in that order, before any code is sent.

The customer’s email address is no longer read out on a refund call. Asked “what address did you send it to?”, your receptionist would say the whole address aloud. On a refund that address comes off the order rather than from the caller, and whoever is holding the phone is not always the customer. It now says only the provider — “the address attached to the order, at gmail dot com” — which is enough for a real customer to recognise and not enough to hand anyone anything. An address the caller dictates on the call is still read back in full, because they are the one who just said it.

How refunds work

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Calls no longer end while the caller is still speaking

A caller who asked a question at the end of a call could be hung up on without an answer. Someone who had just finished making a booking and said “thank you very much — is this all done now then?” had the line end on them. They were asking whether the booking had actually gone through, and the phrase “all done” inside their question was mistaken for them saying they were finished.

A question is never treated as a goodbye now. If the caller asks anything at all — whether it is booked, what happens next, when the email arrives — your receptionist answers it and waits. Saying goodbye properly still ends the call straight away, so finished calls do not sit on the line.

The goodbye itself was also being cut off. Your receptionist says “thanks for calling, goodbye” before the line closes, but it was only waiting a fraction of the time that takes to say, so callers heard it clipped or not at all. The longer the message, the more was lost — the message about a call running over its allowance was losing most of itself. The wait is now worked out from the length of what is being said, so every ending is heard in full.

How phone calls work

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Appointments booked further ahead are no longer lost

If a caller agreed an appointment more than about a week away, it was dropped on the very next thing they said. They would agree a time, give their email, and be told “sorry, that is no longer available” — then offered times for today instead. Nothing had been booked by anybody else. The appointment was never taken; your receptionist had simply stopped being able to see that far into the diary when it went back to check.

The further ahead the appointment, the more certain it was to happen, so it hit exactly the bookings people plan around — and it hit businesses with longer opening hours hardest, because more appointments a day meant it could see fewer days ahead.

What happens now. Your receptionist looks further into the diary before deciding anything, so an agreed time stays agreed for the rest of the call. A time that genuinely has been taken by somebody else is still reported as taken — we test both, because a fix that simply never said “taken” would be worse than the problem.

How phone calls work

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Your receptionist remembers who is calling for the whole call

It recognised a regular at “hello” and then forgot them. A customer would be greeted by name, and three sentences later be asked for the phone number they were ringing from. Your receptionist was working out who it was talking to from each individual sentence, so the moment somebody said something short like “use my account”, there was nothing in that sentence to recognise them by.

Now it settles that once and keeps it. Details you already hold are used instead of being asked for, which also removes the most error-prone thing on any call — a customer spelling an email address down a phone line.

Being recognised still is not proof of identity. Anything that creates a booking, a refund or an escalation still sends a six-digit code to the email on file and waits for it to be read back, exactly as before. Recognising somebody saves them repeating themselves; it does not unlock their account. You can switch that verification off per request type if you want to, but it is on by default.

How phone calls work

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Tell your receptionist how your business actually works

There is a new AI Instructions page in your dashboard. Your refund and booking policies say what to do when something happens. These say how you work — the things you would have to explain to a new receptionist on their first day.

“We only take MOT bookings on weekday mornings.” “Never quote a price over the phone.” “Always ask which branch they mean.” Write it exactly as you would say it to a member of staff, and your receptionist follows it word for word.

Each rule is separate, and each can be switched off without deleting it. You choose when it applies — every conversation, or only bookings, cancellations, refunds, orders or prices — so a booking rule is never in the way on a refund call. You can mark a rule as something the assistant must never do, and set which rule wins when two of them pull in different directions.

Anything involving money can be set to hand over to you. Mark a rule “hand this to a person” and your receptionist will state it and pass the matter to your team rather than acting on it itself.

Open AI Instructions

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Cancellations now record why, and cancellation charges are never taken automatically

A cancelled appointment recorded nothing about why it was cancelled. So when a customer rang to ask, the honest answer was “it is marked cancelled, but I do not have a reason recorded” — the least useful thing your receptionist can say to somebody who rang up to find out.

Cancelling from the dashboard now takes a reason and an optional note, and records whether it was you or the customer who ended it. Your receptionist can then answer the question properly next time somebody asks.

If you charge for late cancellations, your receptionist says so and hands it to you. Add the terms as an instruction on the new AI Instructions page and mark it “hand this to a person”. The caller is told the charge applies before they ring off — rather than finding out when it reaches their card — and your receptionist never takes the payment, waives it, or promises either way. That is your decision to make.

Open bookings

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Checkout would not open. It does now.

If you tried to change your plan or add an add-on since 10 August, the payment page did not open. Pressing “Continue to secure checkout” sent you to the sign-in screen instead — even though you were already signed in. Signing in again just brought you back to the same place. “Manage existing billing” was affected in the same way.

What went wrong. When we moved sign-in to its own secure service on 10 August, the way your session is stored changed so that it can no longer be read by anything running in the page. That is deliberate and it is the safer arrangement. The checkout page, though, was still deciding whether you were signed in by looking for the old details — found nothing, and concluded you were a stranger. It never actually asked. Your account, your plan and your payment details were never at risk, and nothing was ever charged incorrectly; the page simply refused to go any further.

What happens now. The checkout page asks our systems whether you are signed in rather than guessing, so it opens straight away. If you genuinely are signed out it takes you to sign in and brings you back to what you were buying. New customers coming from the pricing page still go through sign-up with their chosen plan intact.

Nothing is needed from you. If you gave up on an upgrade or an add-on in the last two days, it will work now.

Open billing

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Your receptionist greets regulars by name

When somebody already in your customer list rings from the number you hold for them, they are now greeted by their first name. “Hi, you are through to Baker Plumbing” becomes “Hi Sarah, you are through to Baker Plumbing”. It is the difference between ringing a company and ringing a company that knows you.

Only the number the phone network provides is used. A number somebody reads out over the phone is not used for this — that is the number printed on the outside of a parcel, and it is not proof of who is holding the phone. Being greeted by name also unlocks nothing on its own: what your receptionist is willing to discuss about an account is decided by the same identity checks as before, and those are unchanged.

Only a first name, and only one we are confident about. Never a surname, never an account detail, and nothing at all if the name we hold does not look like a name — imported lists often carry “Unknown” or a blank in that column, and saying that aloud is worse than saying nothing. Anyone we do not recognise, or anyone withholding their number, hears exactly what they heard before.

You can turn it off. If greeting people by name is not right for your line of work, it is a single setting in Call Studio.

How phone calls work

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Background noise no longer talks over your receptionist

A television, traffic, or somebody else in the room could stop your receptionist mid-sentence. Worse, whatever the noise was mistaken for was then treated as something the caller had said, so the reply that followed could be about nothing at all. On a busy shop floor or from a car, that made calls feel unreliable.

Saying “yeah” or “mm-hm” also stopped it dead. Those are the noises people make while they are agreeing with you, not interrupting you — a person does not stop talking because you said “mm”. Your receptionist now carries on through them.

Interrupting still works, and that has not been weakened. Start a sentence and your receptionist stops and listens, exactly as before. If it does hold on through something and you carry on trying, it always gives way — nobody gets stonewalled. And when it is reading out something you need to write down, such as a verification code, it will finish that short sentence rather than losing it to a cough.

How phone calls work

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The add-ons page tells you where you stand

It was one long list in no particular order. What you already pay for, what you could buy today and what is not yet available to buy all looked the same and sat mixed together, so the page could not answer the first question anybody has. It is now in three groups: what is on your plan, what you can add, and what is available on request.

Prices are written as prices. They read “£49/month” rather than “GBP 49/month”, and two parts of the page that formatted them differently now agree.

One add-on was showing a technical error message as its status. If our payment provider was briefly busy, the raw message it returned was printed on the card, which read as though something was broken. That now says plainly that we could not confirm the price just then and to try again shortly.

Plain descriptions. The cards described the technology behind each add-on rather than what it does for you. They now say what you get.

Open add-ons

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Phone numbers, email addresses and references are now read out properly

A phone number was read as one enormous number. Given 07359563178 the assistant said it as a single figure in the billions, which is the one thing a caller cannot write down. It now reads numbers digit by digit, in the groups they are written in, with a pause between them — the way a person reads a number to someone holding a pen.

Email addresses came out wrong in the part that matters most. “gmail” was pronounced as an invented single word and “.co.uk” came out as “uck”. The common providers and endings are now said correctly. Your own domain is never guessed at — if it is not a standard ending it is read plainly, letter for letter as you wrote it.

“AI” was being said as “a eye”. It and the other abbreviations the assistant uses are now spelled out properly when spoken.

Order references were pronounced rather than spelled. A reference like QA-ORD-99820 was read as a word followed by a number, so a caller had no way of checking it against what is printed on their parcel. The letters are now spelled and the digits read one at a time.

Card numbers are still never read aloud — that rule is unchanged, and we test it specifically alongside this.

How phone calls work

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Asking for a different day than the ones offered booked the wrong day

This is the most serious kind of booking fault, and it is fixed. When the assistant had read out times for one day and the caller asked for a different day at the same time — “can I do Thursday the thirteenth at ten o’clock?” after being offered Wednesday — it confirmed the day it had offered, not the day the caller asked for. Rephrasing did not help: the same wrong day came back each time, including when the assistant asked which of the two days was meant and the caller answered.

Nothing was ever written into a diary wrongly — the flow stops for confirmation before anything is recorded. The harm was that the caller was told the wrong day and could ring off believing it, and that asking again in different words did not help.

A day the assistant did not offer is now treated as a request, not a choice. It looks that day up properly and either offers the real times on it or explains why it cannot. Naming one of the days it did offer still works exactly as before.

Three more ways of choosing a time now work. “The thirteenth at ten” understands the date. A bare number — “eleven please”, “ten”, “nine” — picks that appointment, which is how most people answer when three times are read out to them, and it previously selected nothing at all. And “I’ll take the earliest” now books the first one offered. Where a business offers two appointments at the same clock time in different halves of the day, a bare number is never guessed at — the assistant asks.

How booking works

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Your receptionist says times like a person, and understands how callers actually ask what’s free

Times and dates were being read out as digits. The assistant handed “09:00” and “Wednesday 12 August” straight to the speech system, so what your caller heard depended entirely on which voice was reading — anything from “oh nine hundred” to “zero nine zero zero”. It now says “nine o’clock”, “half past five in the afternoon”, “quarter to three”, “midday” and “Wednesday the twelfth of August”, which is both clearer and the same every time.

It only ever says a time it can also understand. We checked every one of the 1,440 minutes in a day: the assistant speaks it, then reads it back to itself. Anything it could say but not understand is left as it was — because the worst thing that can happen on a call is a caller repeating exactly what they were just told and not being understood.

“Have you got anything on Thursday?” now gets you times. That phrasing — along with “what times are free?”, “is there anything free next week?”, “any space on Friday?” and simply “anything Thursday?” — was not recognised as a question about your diary at all, so the caller was asked what time they wanted instead of being offered any. All of them now bring back real appointments from your timetable.

“After work” means the evening. Along with “before work”, “after lunch” and “end of the day”, it used to mean nothing, so a caller who had said exactly when suited them was offered the opposite end of the day. One business open until eight in the evening was telling callers there was no after-work appointment available. Saying “after work please” once times have been read out now narrows them properly.

“A week today” meant today. One of the commonest ways to book anything in Britain, and it booked the caller in for the same day — as did “two weeks today” and “a fortnight today”. A wrong day is worse than no day, because the caller accepts a time and only finds out on the day. Fixed, along with “can I come at noon?”, which had never been understood as a time at all.

How booking works

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Callers ringing to cancel an appointment were offered new ones instead

Somebody phoning to cancel was treated as somebody phoning to book. The word “appointment” appears in both, and the AI took “I need to cancel my appointment” as the start of a new booking — so it read out available times, told the caller their appointment was booked, and sent them a verification code to confirm a booking they were ringing up to get rid of. It stayed on that footing for the rest of the call.

No appointment was ever created — the flow stopped before anything was written down, so nobody’s diary was affected and no cancellation was silently turned into a booking. The damage was to the caller, who could ring off believing their appointment was cancelled when nothing had happened, and to you, because nobody was told they wanted to cancel.

What happens now. A caller asking to cancel or move an appointment is recognised as doing exactly that. The AI says plainly that it cannot change an appointment itself, takes their details, and passes the request to your team so a person can deal with it. It no longer offers times, and it never claims to have cancelled anything. Asking to move or reschedule an appointment — including “push it back an hour” — is handled the same way.

Separately: if one of your services has a word like “emergency” in its name, it no longer sets off an alarm. A business offering “Emergency callout”, “Injury assessment”, “Legal consultation” or “Complaint handling” found that a caller simply naming the service was answered as though they were making a complaint. The AI now recognises your own service names for what they are. Genuine emergencies, complaints, injuries, legal threats and requests for a manager are all still escalated exactly as before — we test each of those specifically, because that is the one thing that must not get quieter.

How booking works

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Your receptionist now reads the right part of your rulebook, and your allowance goes further

You can write four separate sets of rules — refunds, bookings, orders and escalations — and until now the AI was handed all four on every single thing a caller said. On a call about a refund it was still reading your booking rules; on a caller simply giving their name it was reading all four. That is a lot to hold in mind at once, and it is the reason it sometimes applied the wrong one. It now works out which of your four sets of rules governs what the caller has just asked, and applies that one.

It also stops carrying things it does not need. Your appointment diary was being loaded into every single exchange even when nobody had mentioned booking, and your recent orders, refunds, bookings and escalations were all being carried on every call regardless of who was on the line or what they wanted. Now each of those is included only when the conversation actually calls for it — and a caller who has confirmed who they are is answered from their own records rather than from a list of everyone’s.

What you will notice. Answers stay just as complete, and your plan’s AI allowance now stretches noticeably further, because a typical exchange carries roughly a third less than it used to. Replies are also fractionally quicker. Nothing about how your rules are written has changed, and nothing has been shortened or summarised — your policies reach the AI in full, word for word, exactly as you wrote them.

The safety rules were never part of this. The instructions that stop the AI inventing an order, promising a refund it has not been given, discussing one customer’s details with another, or acting on anything a caller tells it to do are sent in full on every exchange without exception, and we test that they are still there on every kind of call.

How the AI uses your business rules

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Your receptionist now understands a lot more of what callers actually say

The most important fix: asking a question about your diary no longer books the caller in. When the AI had offered three times and the caller asked “have you got anything earlier?” or “what’s your first available appointment?”, it treated the question as though they had picked one of the three — and quietly settled on that time. Callers asking to look further down the diary were being pointed back at the front of it. Those are now treated as questions and answered by showing different times.

Asking for a time of day works. “Anything in the morning?”, “have you got an afternoon slot?” and “do you do evenings?” used to be answered with the next three appointments whatever time they were — so the answer to a question about mornings often contained no morning at all. The AI now looks for real slots in the part of the day the caller asked for, across the days ahead, and says plainly when you simply do not open then.

More ways of naming a day and turning times down. “Do you do Saturdays?”, “anything at the weekend?”, “can you do next week?”, “have you got any more?” and “neither of those work” were all understood as nothing at all and got the same three times read back. They all work now.

Callers are no longer named after their complaint. Someone who opened with “it’s damaged” could be recorded and addressed as “Damaged” for the rest of the call — and saved that way on your customer list. That affected around half of the ordinary ways people start a call about a faulty item. Real names are unaffected.

Refunds, references and reaching a person. “It doesn’t fit”, “wrong size”, “not as described” and “I don’t want it any more” did not count as giving a reason, so the caller was asked what had happened all over again. A reference read out loud could be mistaken for an appointment time. And asking for “a person” or “a human” only reached your team if the caller happened to say the word “manager” — otherwise nothing was logged and nobody rang them back. All three are fixed. Two sign-offs that used to leave the line open now end the call properly.

How booking works

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The “Contact our sales team” panel on the pricing page had its text pressed against its own edge

The enterprise contact panel near the bottom of the pricing page was laid out wrongly. Its heading and text started one pixel from the panel’s left border rather than being set in from it, so the words looked like they were sitting on the line meant to contain them — while the box itself was far taller than its contents, leaving a large empty gap above and below and the two buttons floating in the middle of the blank space beside the text.

The panel is both a bordered box and a page section, and each of those two things was setting its own spacing. The page-section spacing won, which is right for an ordinary section and wrong for one that draws a box — so the box lost the padding that keeps text away from its edge. It now has proper space on all four sides and matches the question cards below it.

While fixing it we checked every other panel on the site for the same fault. It was the only one. We also restored the spacing above the reviews section on the pricing page, which had ended up sitting too close to the plan cards when it was added earlier today.

See the pricing page

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You can now see what paying every 6 months or yearly actually saves you

The pricing page used to show the longer billing periods without saying what they were worth. You could switch to 6-month or yearly billing and see a bigger number, but working out whether it was a good deal meant doing the arithmetic yourself. The billing-period buttons now show the saving up front — 10% off on 6 months and 20% off on yearly — and each plan then shows exactly what that means for it: the pounds saved, the percentage, and what it works out at per month. Growth on yearly billing, for example, saves £238 and works out at £79.17 a month instead of £99.

Every one of those figures is calculated from the real price you would be charged, so none of them can drift out of date if prices ever change. The percentage on the buttons is the lowest saving of any plan, so no plan ever saves you less than the page advertises. Enterprise shows no percentage, because its terms are agreed with you rather than published.

Two display faults went with it. The Enterprise plan showed the word “Custom” at the same enormous size as a price, so it stretched across the whole card and crowded everything around it — it now reads “Custom pricing” at a sensible size. And on the 6-month and yearly views, Pro’s price was too wide for its card, so “/6 months” dropped onto a second line and pushed everything below it out of line with the other plans. All four plans now line up row for row whichever billing period you pick.

The add-ons section had the wrong pictures on it. Three different add-ons shared the same telephone icon and two shared the same sparkle, so they were hard to tell apart at a glance. Worse, “Additional Phone Number” was illustrated with a pound sign and “Review Request Controls” with a plain tick that looked like a completed checkbox. Every add-on now has its own icon that matches what it does.

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Four things were wrong on the pricing page, and reviews now have a place on it

The “Most popular” label was printed on top of the Growth plan’s own heading. On every screen wider than a phone, the label sat over the words “Complete receptionist” so neither could be read properly — on the plan we recommend most. The label now sits on its own line and both are legible.

The four plan cards did not line up. Their buttons, badges and “compare all features” links sat at up to four different heights depending on your screen width, which makes plans harder to compare side by side. All four now line up exactly.

The Enterprise column of the full comparison table was cut off on tablets and small laptops. The words “By agreement” were sliced in half and scrolling sideways could not reach them, so the column explaining that Enterprise pricing is negotiable was the one column you could not read. The table now scrolls to its full width.

The list of companies that handle data for us was cut off mid-sentence on phones. On our privacy, GDPR, terms and cookies pages, each entry ran off the right-hand edge — so lines ended like “Identity and login data only — email ad”. This is information we are required to publish clearly, and it is now fully readable on a phone.

Reviews now have a proper place on the pricing page. There are no reviews yet, and rather than hiding the section entirely we now say so plainly and explain how it works: we do not write our own reviews, we do not pay for them, we do not filter them by rating, and the “verified customer” marker is set by us from the account rather than by whoever is writing. Every review we receive will appear exactly as it was written.

See the pricing page

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The home page reads properly again, and six endpoints stopped talking to strangers

The heading above the browser demo was jammed against the section above it. “Try the AI receptionist right now” sat six pixels below the join between two sections, where every other block on the page leaves about ninety — so it looked like it had fallen out of the section above rather than starting a new one. It has proper space now. Three smaller things went with it: the three cards under the opening headline had their titles centred over left-aligned text, four links were too small to tap comfortably, and headings could break with a single short word stranded on its own line.

Separately, six of our own internal endpoints were answering anybody who knew the address. None of them held customer data or anything secret, and nothing was taken — but between them they described our hosting, named internal components, gave out a maintenance command, and listed which parts of the product are still being built. All six now require a signed-in SIMCOAI engineer. A plain “is the service up” check stays open, because that is what uptime monitoring needs and it carries no detail. We also added an automatic check across all 402 endpoints that fails the build if any of them is ever left open by mistake.

See the home page

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Customer reviews now sit where people are deciding

Reviews were tucked away at the foot of the pricing page, below even the pricing FAQ — past the point anyone is still weighing up a plan. They now appear directly under the plan cards on the pricing page, under the opening section on the home page, and on the features and about pages too.

They are also easier to read. A review is something a business owner sat down and wrote, and it was being displayed like small print: caption-grey, and stretched to whatever width the page happened to give it — on a wide screen that meant single lines over 160 characters long, which nobody reads. The words are now the largest thing on the card, in full reading contrast, held to a comfortable line length, with the rating and the verified marker clear beside them. The verified tick was also rendering several times its intended size and drowning out the star rating; that is fixed.

One honest note: we have not published any reviews yet, so these sections currently show nothing at all rather than an empty heading. The first review requests go out to customers fourteen days after they join. We will never write our own, pay for one, or hide the critical ones.

Read reviews

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Every page now downloads a little less

The scripts behind the site and your dashboard were being published exactly as they are written, which meant every explanatory note our engineers had left for each other was downloaded by everyone who opened a page. Those notes are useful to us and of no use to you, so they now stay with the source and are removed when the files are published. About 78KB less to download across the site, and rather more than that on the dashboard, which loads the largest of them. Nothing about how anything works has changed — the code that runs is identical, and we check that automatically every time it is published.

See what SIMCOAI does

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Rating SIMCOAI is stars now, and you can give half of one

The review form asked how you would rate SIMCOAI and then offered five bordered boxes reading “1 star”, “2 stars” and so on. It worked, but it looked unfinished and it forced a whole number on people who wanted to say something in between. It is a row of gold stars now, and half stars count. Tap the left half of a star for a half, drag across the row on a phone, or use the arrow keys — and the wording underneath tells you what you have chosen, so you are never guessing from a few pixels of gold. Ratings already published are unaffected, and reviews on the site now show half stars properly instead of rounding them down to the nearest whole one.

Write a review

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Proof upload links now say who they are from

When you send a customer a secure link to upload photos of a damaged item, the page they open could not name your business or the order it was about. It said “Upload your proof” and “your files are sent securely to the business handling it” — no business name, no order number, and it called every request a “request” even when it was a refund. Being asked to upload photographs by a page that cannot say who it is for is exactly what people are told to be suspicious of, so some customers will have abandoned it. The page now leads with your business name, says which kind of request it is, and shows the order reference. Nothing about how the links work has changed and existing links are unaffected.

Two smaller things went with it. The page was also being sent more about the customer than it ever displayed, including a phone number it had no use for; it now receives only what it puts on screen. And the Proof & evidence panel in your dashboard used to head itself with a 36-character internal record number, which told you nothing about which refund you were looking at — it names the order and the customer instead.

How refunds and proof uploads work

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Refund amounts, and three styles that were never reaching your browser

Money in your orders and refunds tables was printed without its pennies. £148.50 appeared as “£148.5”, which reads as a mistake on a page about somebody’s refund. Two related faults went with it: an amount recorded in euros or dollars was shown with a pound sign, which is not a formatting slip but a wrong statement about what you owe; and an amount of zero was shown as a dash, which is how the table says “we were never told”. All three are fixed, and a call lasting zero seconds now shows as 0s rather than a dash.

Separately, three pieces of styling had been silently discarded before they ever reached a browser. Our stylesheet is compressed before it is published, and the compression was removing a space that a particular kind of rule cannot do without — so the rule was dropped entirely, with nothing to show anything was wrong. The visible effects: on iPhones, the bottom bar did not leave room for the home indicator; and the search box on our documentation site and the customer picker in your dashboard each positioned their results list a few pixels adrift. All three now publish correctly, and the build refuses to publish at all if it ever happens again.

Open refunds

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Booking a time by phone, and an assistant that stops talking over itself

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.

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Passkeys are live, and two-step sign-in actually works now

You can now sign in with a passkey — your fingerprint, face or device PIN, or a security key. Choose Continue with a passkey on the sign-in page. It cannot be phished, there is no code to type, and the biometric check happens entirely on your own device: no fingerprint or face data ever reaches SIMCOAI. This also corrects something worse than a missing feature. The Security page previously offered an authenticator-app setup that saved the code to this workspace, which sign-in stopped consulting when it moved to the secure sign-in service — so you could set up two-factor authentication, be told it was active, and never once be asked for a code. That setup has been removed and replaced with what genuinely protects the account. Authenticator apps and security keys are now supported by the sign-in service too; ask us to switch them on for your account.

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The sign-in page looks like SIMCOAI again

The sign-in page was a single form on an empty background — correct, but it read like a generic login screen rather than part of the product. It is back to the two-column layout it had before: what SIMCOAI does on one side, the sign-in card on the other, in the same colours, type and buttons as the rest of the site. The left side now shows what the product actually does — answering calls, handling order and refund questions, billing and reporting — instead of a photograph that sat behind the sign-in card and showed around its edges. Everything in the card now lines up the same way, rather than the heading being centred above left-aligned fields. The cards, buttons and headings now use exactly the same shapes and colours as the rest of the site rather than approximations of them, and some stray decorative lines have been removed. There is a Back to SIMCOAI button to return to the website without using the browser’s back arrow. The wording has been rewritten throughout, including the reset, expired-link and new-password screens, and on a phone the sign-in form comes first with everything else below it.

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The dashboard could sign you straight back out again

After signing in successfully, the dashboard could decide you were not signed in, send you back to sign in, and repeat — refreshing over and over until the browser gave up. Your sign-in was working correctly every time; the dashboard was checking for a marker that used to be written by the old sign-in page, which was retired earlier the same day, so it never found one and threw a valid session away. It now asks our servers whether you are signed in rather than guessing from what it can see in the browser, which is the only thing that actually knows. It also stops after a few failed attempts and explains what happened instead of looping.

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Signing in could fail with “redirected you too many times”

If signing in failed for any reason, your browser was sent back to try again straight away — and because the cause was still there, it failed again, until the browser gave up with a “redirected you too many times” error. The reason was never shown, which made a small problem look like the whole service being down. A failed sign-in now lands on a page that explains what happened and waits for you, with a link to try again. The specific fault behind it is fixed too: if you had signed in with Google and later set a password, the two were treated as different people and the password was refused. They are now recognised as the same account, and no existing sign-in method has changed.

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You can sign out of the dashboard again

The account button in the top right of the dashboard now opens a menu showing which business and which email address you are signed in as, with links to Billing, Security and the documentation, and a Sign out button. Pressing the button previously did nothing visible: the menu was being opened correctly but was drawn far below the page where nobody could see or click it, so there was no way to sign out from the dashboard at all. Signing out now ends your session on this device and on the sign-in service, so returning to the dashboard asks who you are instead of letting you straight back in. If you sign in with Google you will now be asked which Google account to use rather than being signed back in silently, which is what makes signing out mean something on a shared computer.

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Password reset links now stay on the SIMCOAI sign-in address

Links in password reset emails used to point at a long address that did not look like SIMCOAI, and the page they opened was an unbranded default with none of the SIMCOAI design. On an email about your password, a link that looks nothing like the company it claims to come from is exactly what people are told to be suspicious of. Reset links now open at auth.simcoai.co.uk, the same address as signing in, and the reset, expired-link and new-password screens all carry the SIMCOAI design. The wording on the sign-in screens has been rewritten at the same time; it previously read "Log in to SIMCOAI to continue to SIMCOAI".

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The navigation and footer are now the same on every page

The header and footer are built from one shared source and applied to all 149 pages of the website and documentation, so they can no longer drift apart. Several pages had quietly fallen behind: the nine policy pages had no News link in their navigation, the features page had no Resources link, the updates page had lost its whole contact column, and the page-not-found page had no navigation at all. Some pages were also missing the Reviews and News links in the footer. Everything now carries the full set, the current page is highlighted correctly in the menu, and future changes to either only need making once.

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Signing in has moved, and SIMCOAI no longer holds your password

Signing in now happens on a dedicated SIMCOAI sign-in service at auth.simcoai.co.uk, styled to match the rest of the product so it does not feel like being handed somewhere else. It is the same account — there is nothing new to register. Your password is now held and checked only by that service: every stored password record has been removed from your workspace, so SIMCOAI holds none at all, in any form. Password resets, sign-in links and emailed verification codes all run there too, which means your password is only ever typed into the one place built to handle it. If you sign in with Google, nothing changes and there is no separate SIMCOAI password. The old dashboard sign-in address still works and simply takes you to the new one.

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Changing your password from the dashboard now actually changes it

The Security page had a form that set a password your account no longer signs in with, and then told you it had worked — so the next time you signed in it still wanted the old one. That form is gone. Press the button and we email you a secure link that sets your password on the sign-in service itself, which means your new password is never typed into, or stored on, your workspace. If you sign in with Google there is no separate SIMCOAI password at all, and the page now says so rather than offering to email you one.

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Buttons that were slightly too small to tap are now the right size

Several controls on the SIMCOAI website were a few pixels under the size we set ourselves for anything you tap with a thumb. Nothing was broken, but a near miss on a small button is a real irritation, and some of these were on the worst possible controls to have to aim at.

The cookie banner, which is the first thing anyone touches. The monthly, six-month and yearly toggle on the pricing page, where a mis-tap shows you the wrong price. The “compare all features” link on each plan card, which had no minimum size at all. And every tick box on the site, including the ones you have to tick to sign up, which were rendering two pixels smaller than intended.

Footer links were the odd one out: they were sized properly on a phone and then reverted to the compact desktop sizing on anything wider, so tablets got the tightest version of the lot. They now stay full size across the whole touch range.

All of this was found by measuring the rendered page rather than reading the stylesheet, which is why it had gone unnoticed — every one of these controls carried a size rule that another rule was quietly overriding.

See the pricing page

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You can now read what other businesses think, and tell them what you think

There is a new reviews page on the SIMCOAI website. Every review on it was written by a real customer and published with their permission — and if there are none yet, the page says so plainly rather than showing testimonials nobody wrote.

About two weeks after you start, we will email you once to ask whether you would like to write one. Fourteen days rather than a few, because by then your receptionist has answered real calls and you are describing the product rather than the setup. It is one email; there is no follow-up, and the unsubscribe link in it stops feedback requests without changing anything about your billing, security or service emails.

Three things we have committed to in writing, because a review page is only worth reading if you know how the reviews got there. We do not offer discounts, credit, free months or anything else in exchange for a review or for a particular rating. We do not filter by star rating — critical reviews are published alongside the rest. And a review is marked as coming from a verified customer only when it arrives through the single-use link in that email, which is something our systems decide and nobody can ask for.

Every review is read by a person before it appears, and you can have yours taken down at any time by emailing us, without giving a reason. The full commitments are in the Terms, and what happens to the personal data in a review is set out in the Privacy Policy.

Read the reviews

Write one

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The SIMCOAI voice now goes about twice as far, and returns on 21 August

When you try your receptionist from Call Studio, it reads its answers back to you in the SIMCOAI voice. That voice has been unavailable since 7 August: the monthly allowance behind it had been used up, so replies came back as text with your browser’s own voice reading them instead. Real phone calls were never affected by this — callers ringing your number heard the normal voice throughout, and still do.

Two things have changed. The spoken preview now uses a faster voice engine that costs half as much for the same words, so the same monthly allowance is worth roughly twice as much speech as it was. And the allowance is now paced, so it cannot be spent all at once: there is a daily ceiling, and a reserve that is kept back for your own Call Studio rather than being available to the public demo on our website. Whoever is paying gets the voice last.

Spoken previews you have already heard are also kept for far longer, so repeating the same test costs nothing at all.

The allowance refreshes on 21 August and the SIMCOAI voice returns then. Until it does, Call Studio still answers every question in full — it is the voice reading the answer that differs, not the answer.

Open Call Studio

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A day you were closed could be described as fully booked

When a caller asked about a whole day rather than a particular time — “have you got anything tomorrow?”, “can I come on Sunday?” — and there was nothing free that day, your receptionist could tell them the day was fully booked. If the real reason was that you do not open that day, that was simply untrue: it described a closed business as a busy one.

It also cost you the better answer. A caller told you are shut on Sundays knows to try another day; a caller told you are fully booked may well ring a competitor rather than ask about Monday.

Your receptionist now works out which it is. A day you do not open is described as closed, a day that is genuinely full is described as full, and it offers the nearest day you can actually see them either way.

A date further ahead than your diary is open for is now described as exactly that, rather than as a closure. If somebody rings in August asking about December, they are told it is too far ahead to book yet — not that you are shut that day, which you probably are not.

Where it cannot tell the difference it now says only that nothing is available, rather than picking a reason. Saying less is better than saying something wrong about your business.

How bookings work

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Some questions got a stock answer instead of a real one

Now and then your receptionist answered a caller with “I can take your details and pass this to the team” when it could have answered properly. It was most likely on the questions that took the most working out — a caller raising a second, separate matter part-way through a call was the worst case, as in “and the other thing is, can you check order 11482 for me?”. The details it needed were right there, and the caller got a brush-off instead.

Your receptionist had a limit on how much it could work through before it started speaking. A question that needed more thought could use the whole of that allowance before it had said a word, and it then fell back on the stock line. Nothing was broken, and nothing was recorded anywhere, which is why it took so long to pin down.

We measured what calls actually use rather than guessing, and raised the limit to fit. In our own testing the worst case went from never answering to answering every time. Replies are the same length as before and arrive just as quickly — the limit was never what kept them short.

If it ever does happen again we now record it, so it can be found rather than guessed at.

How phone calls work

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Asking about an order is no longer treated as a complaint

If a caller rang to ask where their order had got to, your receptionist asked them for the order number — and then, depending on how they answered, sometimes treated the whole call as a refund request. A caller who replied “the order number is 4471” was asked what had gone wrong with the order. Nothing had gone wrong. They wanted a delivery date.

It came down to the wording. Answering with just the number worked correctly; answering with the words “the order number is” in front of it did not, and that is the more natural way to say it. Once the call had gone that way it stayed there, so everything the caller said afterwards was treated as part of a complaint they had never made.

An order enquiry is now answered with the order’s actual status. A real refund request is still picked up and handled exactly as before — that half was checked as carefully as the fix itself.

How phone calls work

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The rules you write in your own settings are now followed on calls

Company settings gives you four boxes to write your own rules for refunds, bookings, orders and escalations. Escalation rules were being followed. Refund and order rules were not: if you wrote “always ask for the serial number before logging a refund”, your receptionist did not ask for it, and there was nothing you could do about that from your side.

It asks now. Your own requirement comes after the details SIMCOAI needs to find the record — so asking for your serial number never gets in the way of taking the order number first, which is what makes the request findable at all.

It asks once. If the caller has not got it to hand, the call carries on and the request is still logged with everything else they gave you. Being asked over and over for something you cannot produce is a worse experience than not being asked, and it would cost you the job.

If you have not written a rule of that kind, nothing about your calls changes.

Open Company settings

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A verification code that cannot be delivered now offers to try again

Some requests are confirmed by sending a six-digit code to the caller’s email address. When that address could not be reached — nearly always because it was misheard over the phone, which is the hardest thing to get right on any call — the caller was told the request could not be continued, and that was the end of it. They rang off and nothing was logged.

Your receptionist now says which address it tried and asks the caller to give it again if it has taken it down wrong, then sends a fresh code to the corrected address. Where the address came from the order rather than from the caller, it offers to try a different one on that order instead.

Nothing about the check itself has changed: a request that needs a code still needs one before it is logged.

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You can now talk to your receptionist from your dashboard

Call Studio has always let you test your receptionist before pointing your phone line at it. Until today you did that by typing, which skips the part of a real call most likely to go wrong: whether it actually hears you. You can now press a button, speak, and have it answer — using the same speech recognition that runs on your live phone line.

It shows you what it heard. A misheard word is the commonest fault on any phone call and the caller never finds out; here it is written on screen next to your own turn, so if your service names or your business name are being misheard you can see it and fix it before a customer rings.

The panel now behaves like a call rather than a chat box. It tells you whether it is connecting, speaking, listening or thinking, counts the call length, and lets you replay any answer. You can still type instead — the receptionist answers the same way either way.

What it does is written in plain English now too. When a call logs a booking it says so; when it still needs a detail before it can, it says that. It used to show an internal status label and repeat the sentence the receptionist had just said, which looked like a fault.

One honest note: the spoken replies in this browser test are currently played back with your own browser’s voice rather than the SIMCOAI voice, while we sort out capacity with our speech supplier. Your real callers are unaffected — phone calls use a separate route and still use the SIMCOAI voice throughout. The panel says which one you are hearing rather than leaving you to guess.

Open Call Studio

How phone calls work

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Your customer list has its own page, and you can import one from a spreadsheet

SIMCOAI has kept a record for each of your customers for a while now — it is how the AI recognises a regular from the number they are ringing from instead of asking them to spell out an email address again. Until today that list sat under Growth in your dashboard, which is not where anyone looked for it, and the only way to put a customer on it by hand was to wait for one to ring.

The customer list is now its own page under Operations, next to the orders, refunds, bookings and escalations that are attached to it. That is where you were looking, and it is where it belongs.

You can also bring in the list you already hold. Download a template, or use an export from whatever you use now, and import it. We read the usual column names — and the variations, so “Email Address”, “Mobile”, “Surname” and “Organisation” all land in the right place — and a column named after one of your own custom fields is read into it. Anyone already on your list is matched on their email address or phone number and updated rather than added a second time, so re-importing the same file changes nothing and a nightly export is safe to run again and again.

You are told what happened to every row: added, updated, already on file, or skipped and why. A row with neither an email address nor a phone number is named rather than quietly dropped, because there would be nothing for the AI to recognise that person by. And you can export your list back out as a spreadsheet whenever you want it, on any plan.

Editing a customer is better too. It used to be three small browser boxes asking for a name, then an email, then a phone number, one after the other, with no way to see what you were changing and nothing else editable at all. Now it is a proper form on the page, with their company, notes, status and your own custom fields on it.

How the customer list works

Customer records

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Starting a free trial from our site sent you to a plain sign-in instead

If you clicked “Start free trial” or “Subscribe” anywhere on our website, the page you landed on looked correct — the right heading, the right tab selected, the right button — but pressing the button quietly asked for an ordinary sign-in rather than a signup. Your chosen plan, your billing period and the terms you had just accepted were not passed on with it.

The effect was that a new customer could not start a trial from that page. Anyone who got through it anyway would have arrived without their plan or their acceptance recorded, and been asked to accept the policies again before the dashboard would open.

It is fixed. All three routes — sign in, free trial and subscribe — now carry exactly what they should, and we have added a check that reads what the page actually sends so this cannot come back unnoticed. The page looked entirely healthy while it was wrong, which is why nothing caught it sooner.

Two smaller things on the same page: the plan menu was cutting off its own text on desktop, so you could not read the full name of the plan you were choosing, and the filter buttons on this news page were rendering as plain rectangles instead of the rounded chips they should be. Both are corrected.

Start a free trial

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Your customer records are now available through the API

If you connect SIMCOAI to your own website or systems, you could already send us orders, refunds, bookings and escalations — but not the customer those records belong to. The one thing everything else hangs off was the only thing you could not read or write from outside the dashboard.

You can now list, look up, create and update customer records through the API, and send someone straight from your checkout or booking form into SIMCOAI. Creating a customer is a safe repeat: we match on the email address or the significant digits of the phone number, so replaying your customer list does not create a second copy of somebody already on file, and a blank field you send never wipes a detail we already hold.

Customer records use their own permission, separate from orders and refunds. An integration that only needs to file refunds is not handed your whole contact list with them, and you choose which it gets when you create the key.

Your systems can also be told when something changes rather than having to keep asking. Alongside the existing refund, booking, order and escalation notifications, we now send one when a customer record is created or updated.

Read the API guide

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One AI provider, and our policies now say so plainly

Our privacy policy, GDPR page, terms and cookie policy all listed three AI model providers we might use. In practice your account has only ever run on one of them, and one of the three was never switched on at all — it had no credentials and could not have answered a single message.

We have removed the other two from the product and from every policy page, so the list of companies that can process your data is now exactly the list that does. Fewer suppliers with access to your customers’ conversations, and a policy you can check against reality rather than take on trust.

Nothing changes for how your AI answers: every account was already running on the provider we have kept. The model choices in your dashboard — Economy, Fast, Balanced and Premium — work exactly as before.

If we ever add a provider back, it goes on the policy pages before it processes anything, not after.

Read the privacy policy

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Two things our pricing page still said Pro and Enterprise included, and they did not

In August we removed five capabilities from the plan comparison because they were not finished, and said so at the time. We have now found that two of them were still being sold elsewhere on the same page: a panel describing who Pro suits listed “advanced analytics”, and the Enterprise wording offered “multi-location” features. Neither exists as a product today.

Both are gone, along with the same two claims in the files we publish for AI assistants to read. That second part matters as much as the page itself: when someone asks an assistant what SIMCOAI includes, it answers from those files, so a wrong line there gets repeated to people who never visited our site.

What Pro actually gives you over Growth is more call minutes, more phone numbers, full API access, department routing, proof-upload links and unlimited team accounts. Enterprise is a custom agreement for high call volume, larger number capacity and bespoke terms. The plan comparison table itself was correct throughout and has not changed.

The check that keeps unfinished features off the comparison table only ever looked at the table, which is exactly how these two survived in the wording around it. It now reads the whole pricing page and both assistant files as well, so a claim cannot come back in prose without failing a build.

See what each plan includes

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This updates page was showing a heading and nothing else

If you came to this page recently and found the heading at the top but no updates underneath it, nothing was wrong at your end and you were not missing anything temporarily. The list really was blank. Every update was on the page and none of it was being drawn on screen.

The updates fade in as you scroll down. The rule deciding when to start that fade asked for a proportion of the list to be on screen at once — which worked when there were a dozen updates, and quietly stopped being possible as the list grew, because the list became far taller than a screen. Once it could no longer be satisfied, the fade never started and the list stayed invisible.

It is fixed, and fixed in a way that cannot come back as more updates are added: the fade now begins as soon as the list reaches the screen, whatever length it has grown to. The same rule is used across our site, so any other long page was one section away from the same problem.

Worth saying plainly: this only ever affected whether the page drew itself in your browser. No update was ever removed, and search engines and AI assistants could always read the full list.

Browse the updates

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Every update now has its own page, and you can filter them

This page had grown to more than forty updates in one long list, with no way to link to any single one of them. If you wanted to point a colleague at a particular fix, the best you could do was send them here and ask them to scroll. Links to individual updates — including the ones in our update emails — did not open anything, because there was no such page to open.

There is now. Every update has its own page with the full write-up, the date it went out, and links to the updates either side of it and to related ones, so you can send someone straight to the change you mean. Click any headline to open it.

The list is also sorted now. Updates are grouped into new features, improvements, bug fixes, and policy and transparency, and you can show just one group — useful if you only want to know what has been fixed since you last looked. A filtered view has its own link too, so you can share that as well. Nothing is hidden from search engines or AI assistants either way: every update stays on the page whichever filter you pick.

One fault worth owning, live for a few hours this morning: the filter controls appeared twice, one above the other, and the lower set did nothing when clicked. There is one set now, and it works.

Show only the bug fixes

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Proper explanations of how each part actually works

Our features page listed what SIMCOAI does but never explained how any of it behaves in practice — which is exactly what you need to know before trusting it with your phone line. There are now detailed pages on bookings, customer records, refunds and orders, and escalations.

Each one sets out what happens step by step on a real call, what you control, and, deliberately, where SIMCOAI stops and hands over to your team. The refunds page says plainly that the AI never approves a refund and never takes card details; the customer records page explains why recognising a caller and confirming who they are is treated as two different things.

We also fixed a small fault on three pages that told screen readers they were the About page when they were not.

See the feature pages

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Easier to find us, and our private pages stay private

We went through everything a search engine or an AI assistant sees when it visits us. Our service status page was accidentally hiding the file it needs to display anything, so anyone looking us up saw a blank page where the live status should be. Our documentation — all 63 guides — carried no indication of when a page had last been updated, so search engines had no way to tell a freshly rewritten guide from an old one.

Both are fixed, and every public page across our site, documentation and status pages is now listed in one place so nothing gets missed. We have also been explicit about welcoming AI assistants, so when someone asks one about SIMCOAI it can answer from our own current wording rather than a guess.

Separately, and more importantly: your dashboard and everything inside it now refuses to be indexed on every single response, not just on the pages that happened to say so. Nothing of yours was ever published — but the instruction was not applied everywhere it should have been, and now it is.

Browse the documentation

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Sharing a SIMCOAI link now shows a proper preview

If you sent someone a link to our pricing, features or policy pages — in a message, an email or a chat app — it arrived as a bare link with a tiny square logo beside it, or with no picture at all. Only the home page showed a full preview card. That made a shared link look like it might not be genuine, which is the last thing you want when you are passing our pricing to a colleague.

Every page now carries a proper preview image, so a shared link shows the title, the description and a full-width picture wherever you paste it. We also gave the images on our pages their correct dimensions, so pages no longer jump about as they finish loading, and set the site’s language to British English throughout.

See the pricing page

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Saying “none of those work” now gets different times, not the same ones again

When the AI read out some appointment times and the caller turned them all down without naming one of their own — “none of those are any good”, or simply “no” — it read the same three times straight back. Until now a refusal only counted if the caller said an actual time, such as “I can’t do eleven o’clock”. Turning them all down said nothing the AI could act on, which is the opposite of what the caller meant.

A caller who turns the offered times down is now taken further through your diary instead of being read the same ones again. Everything else is unchanged: “no thanks” still ends the call politely, “no, Tuesday is fine” still books Tuesday, and asking for something later or earlier works as before.

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Fixed: two customers sharing a phone number were treated as one person

If you logged a booking, order, refund or escalation for someone whose phone number was already on another customer’s record, it was filed against that other customer — even when the name and the email address you entered were both different. Households, couples, families and anyone using a business landline share a number routinely, so this was easy to hit and hard to notice: the record simply appeared in the wrong person’s history.

It also mattered for calls. Once a caller has confirmed who they are, the AI can talk to them about what is on their account — so a record filed against the wrong person could have been mentioned to the wrong person. A phone number on its own is no longer enough to decide that two people are the same when the email address says otherwise; the second person now gets their own record, and the number stays with whoever it was first recorded against. Callers are still recognised from their number exactly as before, and returning customers are still matched to the record you already hold.

Records already filed against the wrong customer are not moved automatically, because we cannot tell from the outside which ones were genuinely the same person. If you spot one, open the customer and it can be corrected there.

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The dashboard responds about twice as quickly

Every screen in your dashboard — opening a section, saving a change, refreshing a list — was waiting on a check that ran twice over on every single request, and one of the two runs was thrown away without ever being looked at. It was the largest single cause of the pause you felt between clicking something and seeing it happen.

That duplicate check is gone, and requests that arrive together now share one answer instead of each asking the same question separately. Measured on our own account, an individual action went from roughly 125 to 70 milliseconds, and opening a section — which loads several things at once — went from roughly 195 to 100. Nothing about how you sign in or how your account is protected has changed, and there is nothing for you to do.

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Features we have not finished now say so plainly

A handful of sections in the dashboard are still being built — the phone app, multiple locations, plugins and a few others. Opening one of them showed our own engineering notes instead of an explanation: internal headings, a list of web addresses from inside our system, and a block of raw technical output. It read as though the feature was there and had gone wrong, when the truth is simply that it is not finished yet.

Each of those sections now says that we are still building it, what it will do when it arrives, and which parts of SIMCOAI you can use in the meantime. They are included in your plan and you are not being charged separately for them. If one of them is something you want sooner, there is a link to tell us — it genuinely affects what we build next.

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Fixed: the Integrations page warning about things that were working

The Integrations page listed the parts of SIMCOAI that make your calls work, and told you two of them needed setting up. They did not. Both were working normally the whole time, and neither was ever yours to configure — we run them. Anyone who went looking for the problem was looking for something that was not there.

The page now shows what it should have all along: which of your capabilities are live — payments, phone calls, AI answering, email — described in plain terms rather than as a list of the suppliers behind them. If something really is still being set up, it says so, and it will only say so when it is true.

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Fixed: proof upload links that did not work

On Pro you can send a customer a secure link to upload photos of a damaged or wrong item. Every link listed on the refund or order it belonged to was broken. Copying it, opening it or sending it on took the customer to a page saying the link “was not found or has been revoked” — when nobody had revoked anything. The address the dashboard displayed was not the address that had been issued, so it could never have worked, and the wording sent customers back to you looking for something that had not happened.

Links shown in the dashboard are now the real ones, and we checked them by opening them. Alongside that: a link that has simply run out of time now says it has expired rather than blaming a revocation, and gives the date; you can withdraw a link deliberately, and a customer following a withdrawn one is told exactly that and to ask you for a new one; and you can email an existing link again without creating a second one. Links you send from now on last seven days and the panel shows when each one runs out.

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Pick a customer from your list instead of retyping them

Logging an order, refund, booking or escalation used to mean typing the customer’s name, email and phone number again every time, even for someone you deal with weekly. Worse, a single typo in the email created a second record for the same person, and their history then sat split between the two with nobody able to see the whole of it.

All four forms now start with a search box over your customer list. Type a name, an email or a phone number, pick the person, and the record is attached to them. If they are not on your list yet, add their details there and they are added to it when you save. Every customer also has their own page now, showing their details, your own custom fields, and everything they have ever ordered, booked, been refunded, escalated, called about or sent you as proof — in one place instead of six.

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The AI now checks who it is speaking to

When the AI recognised a caller it would talk about their account straight away. Recognising somebody and having checked who they are is not the same thing, and the difference matters most on the calls where it is easiest to get wrong: a phone number read out over the phone proves nothing, because it is the one detail printed on the outside of the parcel.

Someone ringing from a number already on their record is recognised automatically, as before — the phone network tells us the number before they say a word, so there is nothing for them to do and nothing changes for them. Anyone else is greeted by name if we think we know them, and asked to confirm their name and the email address on the account before anything on it is discussed. Until they do, the AI can still take a new booking, order or refund from them — it simply will not read the account back. A caller who gives their own email address or an order number is still helped with the records that match it, exactly as before.

Every check is recorded, so a customer’s page shows whether their identity has ever been confirmed and how. Nothing is required from you and no setting has changed.

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Fixed: dashboard navigation disappearing when you scrolled

On any page with a row of section tabs across the top — Orders, Refunds, Billing, Security and the rest — those tabs slid up behind the search bar as soon as you scrolled down, and stayed there. They were not just hidden: clicking where they should have been hit the search bar instead, so moving from one section to another meant scrolling all the way back to the top of the page first. The tabs now stop neatly underneath the search bar and stay usable wherever you are on the page.

Three smaller things on the same bar are fixed with it. Text from the page underneath was faintly showing through the search bar as you scrolled past. The usage summary was being squeezed until it read “1792 con…”, and your workspace name was squeezed until it read just “@…” — both now show in full. And across several pages — Ecosystem, Support, Marketplace, Email Studio and AI Models — headings, labels and buttons were being cut off or split part‑way through a word, so a card might read “Business bankin” or “Checkout unavailabl”. Those cards now size themselves to their text instead of cropping it.

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Fixed: allowances not resetting each month on the 6‑monthly and yearly plans

Your plan allowances — conversations, AI phone minutes, AI tokens and the rest — are sold per month, and on a monthly plan they reset every month as they should. On the 6‑monthly and yearly plans they did not. Usage was counted from the day you were last charged, so paying for a year gave you one month’s allowance to last the whole twelve — the customers who committed for longer, and paid more up front, got the least. The same mistake stretched the monthly ceiling on pay‑as‑you‑go spending across the full term.

Allowances now reset every month on every plan, on your own billing date rather than on the first of the month. Being straight about the scale of it: we checked, and nobody had actually run out yet — it was found and fixed before any customer was blocked. Your Plan & Usage page now shows the month you are in and the date your plan itself renews, so the two are never confused.

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A clearer Plan & Usage page

Several things on this page were untidy enough to be misleading. Labels like “Renews” were breaking across two lines in the middle of the word. Every card stated the same figures twice, once with thousands separators and once without, so the same number appeared as both 163,609 and 163609. Dates were shown in American order. An allowance your plan does not include read as “0 used · 0 limit”, which invites you to wonder what you did to use it all up.

Each card now shows the figures once, how much you have left, and turns amber as you approach the limit and red if you go past it on prepaid credit or pay‑as‑you‑go — something you previously could not see at a glance. Anything not on your plan says so plainly.

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Stronger encryption for the secrets we hold for you

Some things you set up in SIMCOAI are secrets we store on your behalf — the signing key that lets your own systems verify a webhook really came from us. Those were already encrypted, and remain so. We have now strengthened how the encryption key is derived, using the standard designed for the job rather than a simpler method, and each stored secret is cryptographically bound to the account it belongs to, so a copy of it cannot be made to work on any other account. We also added a key rotation path, and made the system refuse to store a secret at all if it is ever started without proper key material rather than falling back to something weaker.

Nothing is required from you and no secret needs regenerating. No secret was exposed and none of this was the result of an incident — it is work we did because it should have been done this way from the start.

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New: a customer database, and the AI recognises who is calling

Until now every booking, refund and order carried its own separate copy of the customer’s details, and nothing joined them up. A person you had dealt with twenty times was a stranger on the twenty‑first, and the AI had to ask for an email address on every single call — the least reliable thing that happens on a phone line. There is now one record per customer, matched on their email address or phone number, and the AI recognises whoever is calling from the number they are ringing from and uses what you already hold. Records are created for you as calls come in, and everything that customer has ever booked, ordered or asked for a refund on sits on one page. You can add your own fields too — a flat number, a boiler model, a policy reference — and the AI can read those on a call.

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Fixed: “that booking is already logged” when there was no booking

If a caller sorted out one thing and then asked for another — a refund, and then an appointment — the AI told them the second request was already logged and refused to take it. Nothing was actually logged, and no booking was ever created. The AI was remembering that something had been settled on the call without remembering what, so finishing one request quietly blocked every other one. A caller could only get one thing done per call, and had to hit on the word “another” to get past it. Each kind of request is now tracked separately, so finishing one has no effect on the next.

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Fixed: “ten thirty” being booked as ten o’clock

Saying a time the ordinary way — “ten thirty”, “quarter past nine”, “seven forty five” — lost the minutes. The AI heard the hour, dropped the rest, and offered the right time back before confirming the wrong one, so a customer could agree to half past ten and be written down for ten. Nothing looked wrong on the call. Times said that way are now understood in full, on the phone and in the test call.

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Fixed: the day being lost when a caller paused

People rarely give a day and a time in one breath. If a caller said “tomorrow”, paused, and then said “at half ten”, the AI treated the second half as a fresh start and worked out the time against today instead. It then said the time was unavailable — because it was looking at the wrong day, often one already half over — and read out three times that made no sense. The day a caller has already given now stays put until they change it.

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Fixed: only ever being offered the same three times

The AI reads out three appointment times, which is about as many as anyone can hold in their head. But if none of them suited and the caller asked for something later, it read out the same three again — there was no way to see past them, and the call went nowhere. Asking for something later, earlier, or just “what else have you got” now moves through the diary properly, and if there genuinely is nothing further the AI says so instead of repeating itself.

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Fixed: the wrong phone number read back to callers

Asked to use “the number I am calling from”, the AI would agree and then read back four digits that were not the caller’s. It had the right number all along and was inventing the last part when it said it out loud. A customer told the wrong digits has no way to know whether you have the right number, so this was worse than not reading it back at all. The AI now says the real digits, and will not read back a number, email address or reference it does not actually hold.

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Fixed: no upload link when calling back about an existing refund

On Pro, the AI can email a customer a secure link to send photos of a damaged item. It was only doing so when the refund was brand new — so the one caller most likely to be asked for evidence, somebody ringing back about a refund already in progress, was the one caller who never got a link. They now get one, and if a link was already sent the AI points them back to it rather than issuing a second. The AI also no longer mentions a link when there is no email address to send it to.

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Fixed: “read back what you have got for me”

Asking the AI to confirm the details before ending a call — a sensible thing to do, and something people ask for often — got a generic reply about passing details to the team instead of the booking itself. The AI only recognised the request when it was phrased in one particular way, and any other wording fell through. It now reads back the service, the time, the name and the contact number it has recorded, and says plainly that a booking is not confirmed until your team approves it.

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Fixed: a second request part-way through a call was ignored

If a caller was mid-way through booking and raised something else — “and the second thing is I want to check on order 11482” — the AI carried on with the booking and never acknowledged the order at all. It only counted a caller as having asked something if they phrased it as a question, and people raising a new subject usually do not. The AI now picks up the second request and deals with it, then carries on collecting what it still needs for the first one.

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Fixed: callers being asked which service, over and over

A caller who opened with something ordinary — “have you got any appointments?” — was asked which service they wanted, and asked again after they answered, and again after that. If your business offers a single bookable service the question had only one possible answer and the AI already knew it, so the call could not move on at all unless the caller happened to say the name of the service word for word. The booking was never created.

The AI now takes the service for granted when there is only one to book, and goes straight to offering times. Where there is more than one, it reads out the services you actually take bookings for instead of asking an open question the caller has no way to answer. It still never guesses between two services — booking someone in for the wrong thing is worse than asking.

Callers who turn down the times offered are handled better too. Saying “none of those are any good” used to send the conversation back to the start; the AI now asks what would suit them instead.

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Fixed: status alerts linked to a page that did not exist

You can subscribe to our status page to be emailed when something goes down, when it is playing up, and when it is fixed. Those emails carried a link to the incident — and the link went to a page that did not exist, so anyone following it landed on a “not found” error at exactly the moment they were trying to find out what was wrong.

Status emails now link to the incident on the status page itself, and the page scrolls to it and highlights it when you arrive. Being straight about the scale of this: nobody is currently subscribed to status alerts, so no customer received a broken link. It was found and fixed before anyone signed up rather than after.

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We have removed five things from our pricing page

Our plan comparison listed customer records, a mobile companion, plugins, multiple locations and advanced analytics as included features. Going through the page line by line, those five were not finished products — the groundwork exists, but there is nothing a customer could open and use. They should not have been on a page people buy from, so they have been taken off it entirely rather than reworded or marked “coming soon”.

Nothing you are paying for has been taken away, and no plan price has changed. If any of these mattered to your decision to sign up, please tell us — we would rather hear it. They will go back on the page when they are real.

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Every line on the pricing page now explains itself

The full plan comparison told you a number but not what it counted. Hover over any row — or tap it on a phone — and it now explains what that allowance actually measures and what happens when it runs out, or what a feature really does. So “AI phone minutes” says that unanswered calls are not counted, and “speech recognition minutes” explains that they are the same minutes as your phone minutes measured separately.

Writing an honest sentence for all forty-nine rows is what turned up the five features above that we had not built.

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Fixed: choosing a time on a call now sticks

When a caller was read three appointment times and picked one, the AI could agree to it and then read the same three times out again on the next turn — and again after that. The time they had chosen was worked out correctly and then forgotten before the following sentence, so there was no way to get past it. A chosen time is now held for the rest of the call, so giving your name or email afterwards no longer sends the caller back to the beginning, and the AI can still move the appointment if they change their mind.

Three other things a caller could hear are also fixed. Asking for a time your business is open for, but which does not line up with the start of an appointment, was answered with “we are not open then” — the AI now says it cannot start one exactly then and offers the nearest times either side. A time earlier the same day is now said to have passed, and a date further ahead than your diary is open for is said to be too far ahead, rather than either being blamed on your opening hours or on another customer.

“Two weeks on Tuesday”, “three weeks on Friday” and “in a fortnight” are also understood now. They were being read as the coming week, so a caller could be booked a fortnight early — and agree to a day that sounded right without either side noticing until it came round.

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Fixed: refunds on orders spelled out on the phone

A caller spelling an order number aloud says “oh” for both the letter O and the number zero, and the AI was always hearing the number. An order starting “O R D” — which is most of them — was read back with a zero and then reported as not found, so a refund on a real order could not get started at all. Spelled references are now read as letters, and either reading is checked against your actual orders before a caller is told anything is missing.

Separately, replies on a live call are now put through the same tidying the test call in your dashboard has always used, so formatting characters, web addresses and currency symbols are spoken properly instead of being read out as written.

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Clearer terms for prepaid credit and the call notice

Our billing policy now sets out how prepaid credit works: it is drawn down by usage, it stops at zero rather than building a bill you have not seen, and automatic top-up stays off until you turn it on and is capped by a monthly ceiling you choose. Our telecoms policy has also been corrected — the AI and recording notice at the start of a call is set by us and applied to every call, so it is no longer described as wording you are responsible for choosing. Your own greeting is still yours.

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Fixed: the home page looked wrong on a tablet

On tablet-sized screens the dashboard preview on our home page had grown wider than the photo it is meant to sit on top of, covering almost all of it and spilling out over the background. It looked broken, and on a wider tablet it looked worse. The preview now stays the right size against the photo at every screen size. Nothing about your account or the product was affected — this was our own front page.

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You can now book further ahead on a call

Callers asking for a date more than a few days away were being offered today’s times instead. The further ahead they asked, the more likely it was — and the busier your opening hours, the sooner it started. Any date inside your booking window is now offered on the day the caller actually asked for, and “Wednesday morning” means Wednesday morning.

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Every plan limit, on one page

The pricing page used to hide each plan’s features behind a dropdown, which made the one thing you go there to do — compare — the hardest thing to do. There is now a full comparison of every feature and all twelve usage allowances side by side, generated from the same limits the platform enforces on your account.

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Real appointment times, booked on the call

Set your bookable hours, how long each service takes and how many you can run at once, and the AI offers times from that diary instead of taking a message. It will not offer a slot that is already full, one you are closed for, or one that has already passed — and it understands how people actually say times, from “half past two” to “the first one”.

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The AI recognises your customer

When someone rings about a booking they made three weeks ago, the AI can now find their record from the number they are calling on and answer from it, rather than telling a regular customer it has nothing on file. It only ever discusses the caller’s own records.

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Calls start sooner and the AI keeps up

Long greetings are trimmed so callers can start talking sooner, without cutting the recording notice. The AI also stays with a caller who packs several things into one sentence, and reads an email address back before sending a verification code so a misheard one can be corrected on the spot.

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Secure hosted sign‑in

Signing in to SIMCOAI now happens on a dedicated, hardened login page instead of a form inside the dashboard, so your password is never typed into a SIMCOAI screen. Passkeys, authenticator apps, email sign‑in codes, and Google or Microsoft accounts are available where enabled for your account, and signing out ends the login session too. Your business data stays where it always has, on SIMCOAI‑controlled infrastructure.

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Branded email lifecycle system

Trial reminders, invoices, receipts, payment notices, product updates and workflow alerts now arrive as clearly branded SIMCOAI emails.

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Dashboard speed and unified CSS

The dashboard now loads faster and looks sharper on every page, with a refreshed design across desktop and mobile.

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Consent-first sales emails

Marketing, news and basket recovery emails are opt-in by default. Billing, security and workflow messages remain operational and logged.

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