Build and publish your first flow

A flow is the picture of what happens when someone calls you. You drag nodes onto a canvas, wire them together, and publish. There is no code, and there is nothing hidden behind the picture: what you see is exactly what runs.

The canvas

Open Flows and press New flow. Pick Voice for a call flow or Text for an SMS flow.

The canvas works the way a node editor should:

• Drag the background to pan, scroll to zoom.
• Drag from a port on the right of a node to an input on the left of another to wire them.
• Click a node to open its settings in the side panel.
• Delete removes the selected node and its wires.

Node headers are colored by what they do: green starts, blue speaks, purple routes by choice, cyan reaches people, orange branches on a condition, teal sends messages, red ends the call.

A first flow that is actually useful

Start with the smallest thing that beats voicemail hell: greet the caller, then try to reach a human.

1. Every voice flow begins with Incoming call. It is already on the canvas.
2. Drag in a Say node. Type your greeting, for example: Thanks for calling Kanda Plumbing. Connecting you now.
3. Drag in a Waterfall node and add two or three contacts in the order you want them tried.
4. Drag in a Voicemail node.
5. Wire it up: Incoming call to Say, Say to Waterfall, Waterfall fail to Voicemail. Leave Waterfall success unwired: the call is already connected to a person.

That is a complete phone system. It rings your people in order, and anyone who slips through gets a voicemail that lands in your inbox with a transcript.

Prompts: recorded or spoken

Every prompt field takes either typed text, which Taki speaks with a natural voice, or a recording you upload. Typed text is easier to change. Recordings sound like your business. Mixing both in one flow is fine.

If your callers speak more than one language, put a Language branch right after the greeting. The caller picks a language once, and every prompt after that point follows their choice.

Menus

A Menu node reads a prompt and waits for a keypress. Each choice you add grows a new output port on the node, so the wiring makes the menu obvious at a glance. Set repeats to control how many times a caller who says nothing hears the prompt again, and wire the timeout port to whatever should happen when they never press anything. Sending timeout to a waterfall is usually kinder than hanging up.

Business hours

An Hours branch node has two ports, open and closed. Set your schedule in the side panel. A typical shape is: hours branch, open goes to the waterfall, closed goes to a Say node explaining when you open, then to Voicemail.

Test before you publish

Press Validate at any time. Taki checks the structure of the graph and tells you about problems in plain language:

• Errors block publishing: no start node, two start nodes, a wire that goes nowhere, or a text node in a voice flow.
• Warnings do not block publishing: the most common one is a node nothing can reach, which usually means you forgot a wire.

Publish

Press Publish. The published version is what live calls run. Your draft keeps changing without affecting anyone on the phone, which means you can safely rebuild a flow in the middle of a workday and switch over when you are ready.

Finally, attach the flow to a number under Numbers, then call it yourself. The Calls page shows the path the call took through the flow, node by node, which is the fastest way to see why something behaved differently than you expected.

Next: waterfall routing.