A New Website, a New Portal, and Scheduling Built In

Until now, District AI could book an appointment one way: a caller asked, the assistant checked the calendar, and the time went in while the caller was still on the line. As of today there is a second door. Every District AI workspace gets a public booking page on its own hostname, offering the same times the assistant offers on the phone, from the same hours and the same calendar, and managed from the same dashboard.

That dashboard is also new, rebuilt end to end, and the public website was redesigned around the company we now are: a Canadian telecommunications company providing business phone numbers, calls and texts in Canada, the United States and Europe, answered around the clock by District AI. Here is what shipped.

District Scheduling: one calendar, two doors

Turn scheduling on and your workspace gets a booking page at your-business-book.distronode.com, with a default "Phone consultation" event type already on it: 30 minutes, an hour's notice, up to a week ahead, Monday to Friday, nine to five, in your timezone. That grid is a deliberate copy of the one the assistant already speaks, so a customer who books on the web and a customer who books on the phone are offered the same times. From there it is yours to shape.

• Event types. Add as many as you need, each with its own length, how often a booking may start, buffers before and after, minimum notice, how far ahead people may book, a cap on upcoming bookings per person, and the questions a customer answers while booking. A booking can happen on our built-in video, by phone, in person, or at a link you provide.
• Working hours. Set your weekly hours once, then add overrides for the days you are away or working differently. A booking is never offered outside them.
• Your calendars. Connect Google Calendar, Microsoft 365, or any CalDAV calendar, including Apple Calendar. For each one you choose whether it is checked for conflicts, receives new bookings, or both, so a personal calendar can block time without ever receiving a customer's booking.
• Your team. Add the people who can be booked and put them in teams. A team rotates bookings through its hosts in the priority you set, and when someone leaves, you are shown their upcoming bookings and can hand each one to a colleague before their account is archived.
• Every booking, in one register. Upcoming, past and cancelled, with cancel, reschedule and reassign one click away. The attendee is emailed either way, in your words if you have written them.
• Emails and reminders. Confirmation, cancellation, reschedule and reminder emails each have a template you can rewrite, and you can send up to five reminders per event type, from an hour before to a week before. A test button sends each one to you first.

The phone side moves with it. Your assistant can list your appointment types, read a caller their upcoming appointments, and cancel or reschedule one for them, and it identifies the caller by the number they are calling from rather than by anything they say. Each of those abilities is a switch in your assistant's settings, off until you turn it on.

If you have your own website, the booking calendar can live there too: an inline snippet renders it in your page, and a popup snippet opens it from any button of yours. Tell us your site's domain and we allow it. And for the systems you run yourself, the Developer section holds API keys, signed webhooks that carry every booking change to an address you choose, and a way to connect an AI assistant of your own to your booking data.

Two things about where this runs. First, the scheduler is not a shared service somewhere else: each of our four regions runs its own, on the same host as that region's workspace database, so a European workspace's bookings live in Frankfurt beside its call records, and every region's bookings are in the same nightly backup as the rest of its data. Second, it is open source. District Scheduling is our fork of Calnode, an Apache-2.0 scheduler, published at github.com/distronode-corporation, and nine of our changes have already been merged back into the original project.

The dashboard, rebuilt

Every surface of the District AI dashboard now sits on one component system, the same one AWS uses for its own console, in the palette the rest of our product carries. Light, dark, or whatever your system prefers.

Home is a board. Six widgets (total calls routed, calls this week, customer contacts, average call duration, recent activity, and quick actions) can be dragged into the arrangement you want, hidden, and brought back, and the layout is remembered per workspace. Contacts, call logs, bookings and workflows are real tables now, with sorting, filtering and paging; analytics are drawn as charts; and every destructive action asks in a dialog before it acts, so a stray click deletes nothing.

The navigation is six groups you can read at a glance: Operate (Home, Inbox, Call Logs, Live Calls, District HQ, Video & Meetings), Scheduling (the nine pages above), CRM, Grow (Analytics, Campaigns, Workflows), Configure (Desk, Support, Marketplace, Workspaces, Platform Settings, Billing), and Admin. If you run several businesses, the workspace switcher still carries every one of those pages with it.

A website that publishes its ledger

The new distronode.com is built on a simple idea: a phone company that publishes its ledger. Where the content is a table (prices, regions, controls, documents) it is set as a table; where it is an argument, it is set as prose with room to read. Colour carries information rather than decoration: each of our four regions has its own ink, and a block about Canada is tinted Canada. The type is Bitter for the voice and IBM Plex Sans for the interface, with tabular figures so the prices line up.

The figures on it are drawn from the product itself, not from stock. The home page shows a real call as the product records it, transcript, booking line and summary included. A phone number is shown as a ledger entry with its real overage rate in your currency. The residency map traces live call routes between Montreal, Virginia, Frankfurt and Singapore. Every plan has its own page in US dollars, Canadian dollars and Euros, and the whole site is available in French at distronode.ca. The sub-processor register is now three pages (the register, the full records, and the changelog), and the footer carries our phone number, our email address, and every place you can find us, including GitHub.

Where to start

Try the assistant in your browser on the District AI page, see the plans, or read where every kind of data lives, region by region, on the data residency page. If you already have a workspace, open Scheduling in the dashboard and press Enable.