Most phone lines have two recordings and need six. There is a greeting from whenever the line was set up, a voicemail message somebody made on a Friday, and then nothing: no holiday message, nothing for a caller who is waiting, and a closed message that still says back on Monday from a Monday two years ago. Each one was written on its own, by whoever was free, so they do not agree with each other and nobody notices until a caller mentions it.
Answer once, write all six
Appointments are most of the traffic, prescriptions are their own queue, and nobody should press four things to move a booking.
Your answers stay in your browser. Nothing is uploaded, and nothing here makes a sound file.
What we need to know
Exactly as you would say it when you pick up the phone.
For whoever records this, not for the caller. Never read out.
Write it the way you would say it out loud: nine in the morning to five, not 9:00 to 17:00.
A phrase that follows we are back: at nine tomorrow morning, on Monday.
A phrase that follows closed for. Leave it blank and the message says a public holiday.
A clause that follows and: we ring you back the same working day.
The choices in your menu
What the caller wants, in their words, and the key they press for it. About five at the most.
Before this can be written
Everything the six messages need is here.
The six messages
Edit anything. What you change is what you take away.
The first thing a caller hears when you are open. The menu is read straight after it.
about 10 seconds to read
For whoever records it
- Say Riverbend Clinic as: RIVER-bend, one word.
- If your hours move around, say the widest version out loud and let the menu handle the rest.
Read immediately after the opening greeting, with no pause between them.
about 14 seconds to read
For whoever records it
- This prompt names 1, 2, 0. Those have to be the keys your menu actually answers.
Heard by a caller who is waiting for somebody to be free.
about 10 seconds to read
For whoever records it
- Say Riverbend Clinic as: RIVER-bend, one word.
- Only record this one if callers actually wait. A hold message on a line nobody queues on is a message nobody hears.
Heard by anybody who rings outside your hours.
about 21 seconds to read
For whoever records it
- Say Riverbend Clinic as: RIVER-bend, one word.
- This is the one you will change most often. Keep the words somewhere a colleague can find them.
Replaces the closed message on the days you name.
about 14 seconds to read
For whoever records it
- Say Riverbend Clinic as: RIVER-bend, one word.
- One recording per holiday, or one that names whichever holiday it is. Either works. What does not work is a holiday answered as an ordinary day.
Heard at the mailbox itself, whether they got there from the menu or from waiting.
about 12 seconds to read
For whoever records it
- Say Riverbend Clinic as: RIVER-bend, one word.
- Ask for three things and never four: name, number, what it is about. Past three, a caller drops one.
Take it away
A plain text file. Print it, or send it to whoever has the good microphone.
Once they are recorded
What a phone line actually needs recorded
Every row below is a message this page writes, produced by running one worked example through the generator itself. The seconds are an estimate at a steady reading pace, and they are worth reading twice: a menu that takes twenty seconds to get through is a menu callers escape from by pressing 0.
| The message | When a caller hears it | To read |
|---|---|---|
| During opening hours | The first thing a caller hears when you are open. The menu is read straight after it. | 9s |
| The menu | Read immediately after the opening greeting, with no pause between them. | 14s |
| While they wait | Heard by a caller who is waiting for somebody to be free. | 10s |
| Outside opening hours | Heard by anybody who rings outside your hours. | 20s |
| On a holiday | Replaces the closed message on the days you name. | 13s |
| Voicemail | Heard at the mailbox itself, whether they got there from the menu or from waiting. | 12s |
The two that go missing in real businesses are the holiday message and the one a caller hears while waiting. A missing holiday message is a statutory holiday answered as an ordinary day; a missing waiting message is silence, which callers read as a dropped line.
What it does not do
It does not make a recording. There is no generated voice here and no audio of any kind. A synthetic voice costs real money per character, and the speech built into a browser cannot reliably hand you a file you could upload to a phone system, so promising one would be a promise this page could not keep.
It does not know your phone system. Nothing here reaches a phone network, changes a live line or knows which keys your menu answers. It compares the keys your prompt names against the keys you told it about, which is a comparison worth making and is not the same as checking the real thing.
It does not write your business for you. The words are a starting point from somebody who has never heard you answer the phone. Read every one aloud before you record it, and change the half that does not sound like you.
How it works underneath
Six writers per language, one per message, each taking the same set of answers. Tone changes the greeting and the framing and never the facts, so the hours, the return date and the callback promise are your words in all three registers. The French set was written as French rather than translated, because a French phone greeting has its own conventions and the ones this site serves are Quebec ones.
An answer that is missing stops the pack being written at all. That is the whole design: the failure mode of a generator like this one is a script handed over with a blank in it, recorded by somebody in a hurry, and played to callers for a year. So a missing answer produces a sentence saying which one and what it would have left a hole in, and no script until it is filled in. Some findings only advise: no key on 0, more choices than a caller can hold in mind, a holiday you did not name.
The menu prompt is the one that is checked rather than merely written. The digits it names are read back out of the finished sentence with the same reader the phone menu builder uses, and compared with the keys you gave it in both directions: a prompt that promises a key you do not have, and a key you have that the prompt never mentions. Editing the prompt re-runs that comparison, because an edit is exactly where the two drift apart.
None of it leaves your browser. There is no endpoint behind this page, no account, and no copy of your answers anywhere but the tab you have open.
What happens next
Record them. One file per message, in a quiet room, at the pace you would use with somebody standing at the counter. Whoever has the clearest speaking voice, not whoever has the title.
Convert them. Phone systems want a specific file: 8 kHz, one channel, in the encoding your vendor asks for. The phone audio converter does that in your browser, with no upload.
Check the keys. Your menu prompt names a set of keys. The phone menu builder finds the ones that lead nowhere, and runs the same script-against-keys comparison on the menu itself.
Questions
What messages does a business phone line actually need?
Six, and most lines have two of them. A greeting for when you are open, the menu that follows it, something for a caller who is waiting, a message for outside your hours, one for a holiday, and the voicemail itself. The two that go missing are the holiday message and the one a caller hears while waiting, which is why a statutory holiday gets answered as an ordinary Tuesday.
Does this record the greetings for me?
No, and it does not generate a voice either. It writes the words; a person you choose reads them into a microphone. That is a deliberate line: a synthetic voice would cost real money per character, and the speech built into a browser cannot reliably hand you a file you could upload. What it does instead is hand your own recording to the converter on this site, which turns it into the file your phone system asks for.
Why does it ask how the business name is pronounced?
Because the person recording the greeting is often not the person who named the business. A surname, a street, a word from another language: all of them get read the way they are spelled by somebody in a hurry, and then every caller hears it wrong for two years. The pronunciation never appears in the script. It is printed as a direction beside it, for whoever is holding the microphone.
Why does it check the keys my menu prompt names?
Because a greeting and a menu are edited by different people at different times. Somebody adds a department and updates the routing but not the recording, or re-records from an old draft. The result is a message that says press 4 for deliveries when 4 does nothing, or a working key nobody is told about. This page compares the two while you are still writing, and the phone menu builder does the same check on the menu itself.
Can I change the wording?
You are meant to. Every one of the six is a text box you can rewrite before you take it away, and the file you download carries your words rather than ours. We wrote a starting point, not a script you owe anybody. The one thing worth keeping is the shape: the same name, the same hours and the same callback promise in all six, because that consistency is the whole point of doing them together.
Do you keep my answers?
No. Everything runs in your browser: the worked examples ship with the page, your answers stay in the tab, and the file you download is written on your own machine. There is no endpoint behind this page, so there is nothing for us to keep even if we wanted it.
The message is only half of it
A holiday message that nobody switches on is a holiday message nobody hears. The other half is the hours behind it: a schedule that decides which of these six a caller meets, and one switch for the day the snow closes you. That is the part a phone system does, and it is worth being able to change yourself.