Last updated: October 27, 2026
Who provides the service
We provide Funeral Answering Desk through TypeScience, trading as Funeral Answering Desk. These terms govern your use of our AI receptionist service as a business customer. The governing law for these terms is the law of California.
You can contact us at support@funeralansweringdesk.com about your account, service or these terms. Send requests about personal information to privacy@funeralansweringdesk.com. We sell the service online through the browser demo, email sign-in and onboarding chat, with no phone sales line.
What your subscription provides
Your subscription provides an AI receptionist that answers as your funeral home once your calls forward to it. It uses the business information you supply to ask intake questions, take messages, identify urgency and follow your call handling instructions. You choose whether to forward all calls or only calls that are unanswered, busy or outside your hours.
The receptionist can book appointments into Google Calendar or collect details for your callback. Call information reaches you by email and app push notification, with a summary, urgency tag, transcript and recording. Website chat and consent-based lead follow-up are add-ons.
Your account and business instructions
You provide the account details and instructions the receptionist needs to answer for your business. Onboarding covers your services, service area, hours, price policy, urgent situations and the people who should receive urgent calls. You are responsible for the accuracy of this information and the website content you ask us to use.
Keep your instructions current when your hours, prices, services or on-call arrangements change. You can change settings by telling the AI in plain words and inspect calls and usage in the dashboard. Review the instructions and make a test call before forwarding your business calls to the service.
Monthly charges and usage
Your plan costs $249 per month and includes 500 AI minutes. Extra minutes cost $0.20 per minute and are billed monthly. Your dashboard shows usage so you can check how your business is using its allowance.
The subscription renews monthly until you cancel online. Billing is handled by our payment processor, and we do not store full card numbers. Review the plan allowance and extra-minute charge when deciding how much of your call traffic to forward.
Free trial and payment card
Your free trial lasts 14 days and is capped at 100 minutes. A payment card is required before call forwarding goes live. The browser demo is available without signup so you can hear the receptionist before beginning account setup.
The trial converts to a paid subscription only with a card on file. We send a reminder email two days before conversion. Use your requested trial to check your greeting, intake questions, urgent call routing and messages against the way your home works. You can request a free trial for your business; we email your sign-in link when the trial is ready.
Cancellation and a lapsed plan
You can cancel online in one click, with cancellation taking effect at the end of your paid month. The service is month to month. Canceling stops the monthly subscription from renewing after that paid period.
Calls are routed to your backup number or voicemail when the plan lapses. Keep a backup way to be reached and make sure it fits your on-call arrangements. Cancellation also affects how long account information is kept, as described in the data retention section of these terms.
Greeting and call recordings
Your receptionist states at the start of each call that it is a virtual assistant and that the call is recorded. These notices cannot be switched off. You are responsible for your business greeting and policies within those fixed requirements.
Call audio, recordings, transcripts, summaries and caller numbers are processed as part of providing the service. Calls and chats in our website demo are also recorded and transcribed to show the result. Use fictional details when testing a family inquiry in the demo.
First calls, prices and urgent messages
Your instructions set contact order, backups and extra intake questions for first calls, and guide price inquiries and other urgent messages for your home. A first call is any report of a death, including a removal request from a family, hospice, hospital or care facility. The receptionist takes caller name, callback number and where the person is, then reaches the on-call director at once: a warm transfer if your routing allows it, a page if it does not or the transfer is not answered. Only then does it finish the rest of the intake. First calls do not include upselling.
For price questions, the receptionist uses the General Price List you provide. You are responsible for supplying accurate prices and keeping that information current. It does not invent a price when the supplied list does not answer the question.
For other urgent calls, you set the order for a page or warm transfer to your on-call person; first-call settings never decide whether or when the director is reached. During a warm transfer, that person hears a short summary and presses 1 to accept. Keep the recipient details current and test the route before relying on it for business calls.
AI limits and emergency calls
The AI can make mistakes, so you are responsible for reviewing summaries and keeping a backup way to be reached. Check messages that need your attention and correct business instructions when you identify inaccurate or missing information. The service supports your call handling; your staff remain responsible for the decisions they make from a message.
Funeral Answering Desk is not an emergency service or a replacement for 911. For a gas smell, a CO alarm, sparks or burning smells, or flooding near electricity, the receptionist tells the caller to get everyone out and call 911 or the utility from outside, then alerts you. For a fire, it tells the caller, "Get everyone out first, then call 911 from outside." It then alerts you. For a medical emergency or anyone in danger, it tells the caller to hang up and call 911 right now, then alerts you. Do not use the receptionist as the sole route for emergency assistance.
Consent-based follow-up calls
The follow-up add-on calls people who submitted your web form and ticked a consent box naming your business. You are responsible for obtaining and retaining the consent records for those calls. The add-on is not available for cold calls, list dialing or purchased leads.
Follow-up begins within about a minute and runs from 8 a.m. to 8 p.m. in the recipient's time zone. It makes one attempt plus one retry, and opt-outs are honored at once. Use this add-on only for inquiries with the required consent for your business to follow up.
Acceptable use
You must not use Funeral Answering Desk for illegal activity, cold calling, robocalling, impersonation or harassment. These restrictions apply to the way you configure the service and the calls you ask it to make. We may suspend the service for abuse.
Healthcare use involving protected health information is not permitted. The service is offered for funeral home call handling, and its availability does not change that restriction. Keep your business instructions and use of the service within the permitted scope.
Data processing on your behalf
You decide what caller information your business collects and why it collects it. We process that information on your behalf to provide the receptionist service. These data processing terms form part of your terms of service with us.
Processing includes handling call audio, recordings, transcripts, summaries and caller numbers, together with the onboarding answers and website information used to answer calls. Service providers support hosting and storage, telephone service, AI voice and text processing, payment processing, email delivery and analytics. The AI model provider, OpenAI, does not use our API data to train its models by default.
Calls, website and demo chats, recordings, transcripts and summaries of trial and customer accounts may be reviewed by authorized staff for quality, support and abuse prevention. Access is limited to those purposes.
We do not sell personal information or use callers' data for our own marketing. Customers and callers can contact privacy@funeralansweringdesk.com about access, correction, deletion or opt-out requests. A caller can also ask your business directly. Our privacy policy explains the information we collect from customers, visitors and callers.
Data retention
Recordings are kept for the period your business chooses, either 30 or 90 days, and then deleted. Transcripts and summaries are kept while your account is open. They are deleted within 30 days after the account closes or on request.
Choose the recording period for your business and consider it when deciding when to listen to a call. Account closure and recording retention have different timing, so a recording may reach the end of its chosen period while your subscription is still active.
Service basis and liability
The service is provided as is, and our liability is capped at the fees you paid in the prior 12 months. The AI's ability to answer depends on the information and instructions available to it. Review summaries and maintain your backup contact route as part of using the service.
Your responsibility for business instructions includes the accuracy of your greeting, policies and price information. For follow-up calls, it also includes your consent records. These responsibilities continue to matter when you change settings through the onboarding or settings chat.
Changes to these terms
We notify you by email when these terms change. The date at the top identifies when this version was last updated. Keep your account email current so notices can reach the address associated with your subscription.
Contact support@funeralansweringdesk.com if you need help understanding how a term applies to your account or call setup. Privacy requests belong at privacy@funeralansweringdesk.com so we can address them as requests about personal information.