What Bolt does, and what it won't do on its own

Letting an assistant near the schedule and the customer list is a fair thing to be careful about, and if you're the one in the truck you mostly want to know what you can ask it. So this page sets out what Bolt does when someone asks, what it does only after reading the thing back, and what it won't do at all.

Where Bolt lives and what it knows

Bolt is the assistant inside Office and Field. You type to it or talk to it, and in Field a voice conversation keeps going with the phone locked in your pocket. It answers from the shop's own records: the schedule, customers, sites and their buildings, units and their history, open findings, stock, and hours. Ask what's open on the RTUs at a site and the answer is whatever your techs recorded there, not a guess about what a shop like yours probably has.

Bolt works as the person talking to it. A tech asking "what's my day" gets their own stops, and a manager who can see shop routes can ask about the whole board. It can't reach anything the signed-in person couldn't reach on their own, and it checks that again at the moment it acts, which is why a conversation started this morning doesn't carry authority you lost at noon. The rules are the same whether the request was typed in Office or spoken in a mechanical room, because we didn't want a workflow to get looser depending on which door you came in through.

Routine work happens when you ask

If you ask clearly for something that stays inside the shop, Bolt does it and tells you what it did. That covers recording stock you used, adding a note to a unit, logging hours, starting a report draft, deciding a finding, proposing a schedule change, and setting up a customer or a job. Asking twice because the signal hiccupped gets you one record and the same receipt back, not two.

Anything that leaves the shop gets read back first

Sending or texting a customer, sending a document, anything to do with money, cancelling a visit the customer is counting on, changing an agreement, generating a season of visits at once, and syncing to accounting are a different matter, because each one leaves the shop, commits money or changes what a customer expects. For these Bolt prepares the exact thing, reads it back to you, and does it only once you've said yes to that read-back. There's no magic word; your own words in context are the yes, and you can ask a question in the middle or lose signal and come back without starting over. What you can't do is say yes to something other than what was read back. If the record changed underneath the proposal while you were thinking, Bolt tells you what changed and prepares it again rather than sending the old version.

A draft and a sent document are separate steps on purpose. A draft report or quote is reversible and sending it is not, so Bolt will make a clear edit to the draft right away and then stop and ask before it goes anywhere, and the draft stays editable the whole time you're looking at the read-back.

Working the phone itself

In Field, with a connection, Bolt can also open a stop, start a job, navigate to the site, call the customer contact, and start or stop GPS hours. Which stop it means gets resolved against your live route by customer, site, title or address, and if two stops could match it asks rather than picking one. "Start this job" marks you arrived and opens your hours for that visit together, or does neither, because arrival and hours shouldn't be able to drift apart. If you're still on the clock for a different visit, it stops and tells you instead.

Starting GPS hours through Bolt opens the same consent screen as the Hours button, and nothing tracks until you've finished that and the phone's own permission prompt. Bolt never starts GPS from a background voice session, and in a browser it won't pretend to know whether a phone somewhere else is tracking. Confirming you're on site tells you the confirmation is saved on this phone, which is a different fact from the office having received it.

The sensitive phone actions, texting a customer or retiring a unit, go through the phone's own confirmation as well, and if the stop or the message changed between the read-back and your yes, the phone asks again.

Field has a per-phone preference, "Act on clear requests" or "Confirm every change". New installs start on the first, where a clear ask creates or edits a reversible record and Bolt just summarises the result; the second gets you a read-back before every write. It changes the ceremony and nothing else, so customer messages, dispatch and time-clock changes, deleting things, approvals, delivery and accounting sync still wait for your yes on either setting.

What it won't do

Bolt won't act on a stop it can't identify, won't invent a GPS location, won't mark a visit complete because you muttered that the roof was fine, and won't send anything without the read-back. It also won't hold a conversation without a connection. Notes, photos, readings and voice recordings still save to the phone in the basement, but the live back-and-forth needs signal, and a message you typed while offline just sits there unsent rather than turning into an approved action later.

If the connection drops in the middle of a request, an action Bolt had already sent isn't sent again, and one it isn't sure about isn't quietly retried. Bolt tells you what it knows happened, and the record itself is where to check the rest.

Updated September 21, 2026.