Yaplet voice agents do not have a separate scheduling panel that turns the agent off at 6pm and back on at 9am. Instead, after-hours behaviour is configured two ways: through the agent's system prompt (what to say after hours) and through the pause button (whether to answer at all). This article explains how to combine them.
Option 1 — answer 24/7 with after-hours guidance
The simplest and most common setup: the agent picks up every call, but you tell it in the system prompt what to do when a caller reaches you outside normal hours. The agent already knows the current time and your workspace hours through its built-in context tools, so it can adapt its response on its own.
Add something like this to your agent's system prompt:
Our business hours are Monday to Friday, 9am to 6pm Central European Time.
If a caller reaches us outside those hours:
- Politely let them know we are currently closed.
- Answer general questions from the knowledge base if you can.
- Offer to take a message or invite them to email [email protected].
- Never promise that a human will call back today.The agent will check the current time against your stated hours on each call and behave accordingly.
Option 2 — pause the agent entirely
If you want the agent to stop answering calls at all — for example, during a planned outage, a holiday, or while you redesign the system prompt — you can pause it.
- Open Dashboard → Automation → Voice.
- Find the agent in the list.
- Click the pause button.
Paused agents do not pick up calls even if a phone number is still attached to them. The number itself stays active and is still billed monthly — only the agent stops answering. Click the same button again to resume.
Pausing is a manual action, not a schedule. If you want the agent to pause every weekend automatically, that is not built into the product yet — you would need to pause and resume manually, or use Option 1 to let the agent answer with after-hours guidance instead.
Option 3 — use a knowledge base article about hours
If callers regularly ask "are you open right now?" or "what are your hours?", the cleanest pattern is to put your business hours in a knowledge base article. The voice agent will look it up on the call and read it aloud naturally. See Connect knowledge to your voice agent for how the lookup works.
What about per-number scheduling?
If you have multiple phone numbers — for example, a daytime sales number and a 24/7 emergency line — set each number's agent up separately:
- The sales agent has a system prompt that politely closes after-hours calls and points to email.
- The emergency agent has a system prompt that handles after-hours calls normally.
Each agent is independent, so different numbers can have completely different behaviour without any scheduling logic.
What to read next
If you want to stop a specific person from calling you at any hour — not just after hours — see Block unwanted callers.