AI Setup Interview
Let the setup assistant draft your services, availability, and service area from a short conversation.
Overview
If you would rather talk than fill in a form, the setup assistant can get your business ready for bookings in a couple of minutes. You describe what you do, what you charge, and where you work. It turns that into draft settings you can review and confirm.
It aims to get you far enough to start taking bookings, not to finish your setup. Your full pricing -- size tiers, per-property prices, travel charges -- is more than a conversation can cover, and you set that up properly later. It is completely optional. The setup form does the same job, and you can always set everything up by hand instead.
Before You Start
You need to have just completed the sign-up form in Creating Your Account. The setup form comes next. To switch to the interview, click Set up my business with AI at the top of its first screen.
The Conversation
The Assistant Greets You
The assistant introduces itself as SAM, greets you by your company name, and asks you to describe your work. It already knows your business name and team size from the sign-up form, so it will not ask again.
The prompt asks for three things in one go: what services you offer, roughly what you charge, and the area you cover. Cover all three in a sentence or two and there is much less left for SAM to ask about.
SAM is the same assistant you can reach from the Ask AI button anywhere in the dashboard. It is not a separate setup-only helper.
Answer in Your Own Words
Type your answer in the text box and press Enter or click the send button. There is no fixed format -- write naturally. For example: "Standard home inspections around Denver, $450, usually 3 hours."
As the assistant picks up details from your answer, badges appear below the conversation showing what it captured -- things like Services, Property types, Availability, and Service area.
Follow-Up Questions (If Needed)
If your answer did not cover everything, SAM asks a short follow-up -- at most seven in the whole conversation. Each one targets a single topic, in this order:
| Topic | What it asks about |
|---|---|
| Services | The jobs you offer, by name. |
| Pricing | What you charge. SAM asks until every bookable job has a price, because that is the number your booking page quotes. |
| Previous software | What you are switching away from, if anything. This is the one answer nothing else on file can supply, and it decides whether we can offer to move your templates and data across for you. "None" or "paper" is a perfectly good answer and stops the question coming back. |
| Service area | The town or area you cover. |
| Working hours | The days and times you work. |
| Building types | How you break an inspection type down by kind of building -- Single Family, Condo, Office and so on. Each one can carry its own price, and prices can scale with property size. |
| Travel distance | How far you will travel from your area. Asked last, and skipped if you did not give an area. |
You are only asked about topics you did not already cover, so an answer that mentions everything up front costs you no follow-ups at all. Every topic gets its turn, so answering none of them up front costs you a slightly longer conversation rather than a setting that never gets asked about. Travel distance is the exception: it is skipped when you have not given an area to measure from, and you can set it later in service area settings.
SAM writes these questions in the moment rather than reading from a script, so they follow on from what you have already said -- if you mentioned residential and commercial, it will ask how you split those specifically.
Each topic is asked about once. If you answer and SAM cannot pin the value down, it does not ask again -- the draft gets a sensible starting point and you correct it on the review screen. The only time a topic comes back is when your reply did not address it at all, and then it is reworded rather than repeated.
If you would rather not answer a question right now, click I'll fill this in later below the text box. That skips only the current question and moves on to the next topic without asking again. The assistant fills in sensible defaults for anything you skip.
If anything is still open when the conversation ends -- a topic you skipped, one that went unanswered, or one SAM could not pin down -- it says so and names it, instead of claiming to have everything. Those are the sections most worth checking on the review screen.
See What Was Prepared
When the conversation is complete, a Show me what you prepared button appears. Click it to move to the draft review screen. You can also keep typing to add more details before moving on -- the input stays available after the assistant finishes.
What You Should See
The draft review screen lists the settings the assistant prepared. Each section shows what was drafted and a badge indicating where it came from:
- From what you told me -- built entirely from your answers.
- Starting point -- a sensible default, shown when you did not cover that topic or covered only part of it. Your working hours show this badge if you gave the days but not the times, for example, so it is worth a look before you confirm. You can change it at any time.
The sections may include:
| Section | What it contains |
|---|---|
| Service categories | The Inspection Type entries you described, with property types and any add-ons listed separately. |
| Availability schedule | The days and hours you work. |
| Service area | The city or region you cover. |
The assistant sorts what you said into three levels, because that is how pricing works:
- A Inspection Type is a whole job someone books.
- A property type is the kind of building the job is on. Each one sits underneath a Inspection Type and can carry its own base price, because a condo and a large house are not the same job.
- An add-on is an extra sold on top of a booked job, priced as a surcharge.
So "single family homes and condos, some commercial, plus radon and mold" becomes two Inspection Type entries, three property types, and two add-ons. Single Family and Condo are property types, not two more Inspection Type entries.
Click any section to go straight to the page where that draft appears as a banner. Or click Go to dashboard to review them later from the setup guide.
Bringing Your Data Across
If you told SAM you are switching from another tool, an offer appears under the draft review. What it offers depends on what you named.
| What you are switching from | What you are offered |
|---|---|
| Spectora | We run the whole migration for you. Click Book my migration call to pick a 30-minute slot -- you do not upload anything. |
| Home Inspector Pro or InspectIT | A one-click import. Click Import from ... and the import wizard opens with your tool already selected. |
| Anything else, including Tap Inspect | A person here converts your file. Click Book a call about my file to pick a 30-minute slot and bring the file with you. The card also lists the formats we can take straight away, in case yours is one of them. |
Nothing happens until you click. If you would rather do it yourself, click No thanks, I'll set it up myself and the offer does not come back.
Both of those paths start with the call: you pick a time, we go through your setup together, and we build the migration from there. If you close the booking page without picking a slot, the link stays on the card so you can come back to it.
Once we have prepared the migration we ask you to authorise it from inside the dashboard -- a dialog appears listing exactly what will be copied across, and nothing moves until you approve it.
Did not mention it in the conversation?
You can still import templates yourself at any time -- see Importing Templates.
Reviewing Your Drafts
Each draft appears as a banner at the top of its settings page. The banner shows what the assistant prepared and gives you three options:
- Accept -- click the primary button (for example, Create all for services, Confirm schedule for availability, or Apply service area) to save the draft as your live settings.
- Ask AI -- click Ask AI to open the assistant panel scoped to that section, so it can help you adjust the draft before you confirm.
- Dismiss -- click Dismiss to discard the draft and set things up manually instead. This clears it for good; it will not come back.
On the Inspection Type draft, each entry has a checkbox. Clear any you do not want before clicking Create all -- useful if the assistant read something as a separate job when you meant it as an add-on, or picked up a service you no longer offer.
Underneath those, the banner lists Add-ons you can offer -- the usual extras for your trade, priced at typical rates. These start unticked, because you never mentioned them: tick any you actually provide and they are created alongside your Inspection Type entries. It is the quickest way to pick up the ones worth charging for that you would otherwise have to add by hand later.
A draft waiting on another tab is marked with a dot next to the tab name, so you can see at a glance whether your working hours or service area still need a look.
When you accept the Inspection Type draft, each Inspection Type is created with:
- Property Types -- the ones you named, or the usual list for that kind of job if you did not name any. Each starts at the base price you gave, so you can adjust the ones that should cost more or less.
- Additional Services -- every add-on you mentioned. Add-ons are also added to a separate Additional Services category so you can sell them on their own.
- Additional Information -- common site conditions such as Has Lockbox, Occupied, and Electricity Off. Most are free; a few, like a building over 75 years old, add to the price and the time.
You can change all of this afterwards in Inspection Type settings.
Drafts stay on their pages until you act on them. The setup guide in the top bar marks which steps have a draft waiting.
Skipping the Interview
The interview is optional. If you prefer to set things up yourself, click I'd rather set this up myself at the bottom of the conversation. Your account is already saved from the sign-up form, so skipping costs nothing but the head start.
You go back to the setup form, which asks the same things one screen at a time. See Creating Your Account.
Related
- Creating Your Account -- the sign-up flow and the setup form the interview is reached from
- Setup Guide -- the checklist that tracks your setup progress
- Your Dashboard -- the home screen you land on after the interview
- Importing Templates -- bringing templates in from another tool yourself