If you can't take payments, you can't wait to be answered

First, whether payments work at all

In the first exchange, Sonora AI establishes whether the merchant can take payments at all, or whether it is one payment method or one lane that is down — that distinction shapes everything that follows.

The merchant, identified before anything else

Business name, location, and terminal or store number, read back once to confirm.

Dispatched immediately for a site that cannot transact

No payment method works at all; every card is declining or the terminal cannot reach the processor; a whole lane is down during trading hours at a multi-lane site; a suspected tampered, swapped, or unknown device is attached — treated as a security incident, not a fault; or transactions are duplicating and it is unclear whether a sale completed. All of that pages the on-call engineer immediately.

What Sonora AI does not do, stated plainly

It never asks for, accepts, repeats, or writes down a card number, expiry, security code, or PIN — if a caller starts reading one, it stops them immediately and says nobody here will ever ask for it. It never takes a payment or keys a transaction on the caller's behalf. It never makes a change to the merchant's systems, account, or terminal configuration from the call — the on-call engineer does that once they pick up the ticket. And it never confirms whether a transaction settled, was refunded, or reached the bank, or states a batch total.

Routine work, booked on the same call

Paper and consumables, a spare terminal swap, new installs, menu and price updates, reporting questions, and any single-device fault the merchant can work around in the meantime.

What you see after every call

Every call ends as a summary of what happened — whether the on-call engineer was paged or a visit was booked — and the full transcript.

Frequently asked questions