Phone

Phone is texting and calling on your firm's phone lines, with each contact's texts and calls interleaved into one chronological conversation. Your team uses it to see the whole history with a client or contact as a single thread, place and receive calls straight from the browser, and get a transcript and summary of every call automatically. The app has two channels: Phone, your firm's native Bitment lines, and Quo, a connected OpenPhone workspace. If only one channel is enabled for you, the tab strip disappears and the dock tile opens straight into it.

Where to find it

Open Phone from the dock. Inside a client, the client's Quo conversations sit under Coordination › Quo in the client's sub-navigation.

A conversation with no matching contact is titled by the phone number itself, written the way you'd read it out, such as (985) 222-5230. Searching the list matches names and numbers on just the digits, so (985) 222, 985-222, and +1985222 all find the same thread. On a group thread, search checks every participant's number, not just the first.

Key concepts

Get a phone number

On the Phone channel, open the Lines view to manage your firm's numbers.

  1. Click Buy a number.
  2. Search available US numbers by area code, or choose a toll-free number.
  3. Pick a result, then choose who pays for it: a firm, or you personally. Each option shows its own monthly price before you confirm.

Every number handles voice, SMS, and MMS on one line. A line can be assigned to one operator as their direct line, or left shared as the firm's team line. Releasing a number is permanent and can't be undone.

Enable texting (registration)

US carriers require sender registration before a local number can send texts. The Lines view marks each line Texting ready or Registration needed.

  1. Click the registration badge, or the scope header's texting status chip, to open the registration dialog.
  2. Fill in your firm's business details and how you'll use texting.
  3. Submit. Local numbers go through A2P 10DLC registration, which can take days to weeks; toll-free numbers use a lighter verification instead, available as a checkbox in the same dialog.

Calling works immediately on a new number; only texting waits on registration.

Text someone

Open a conversation, or start one with + New (the round + button at the bottom right on a phone), and type in the compose bar. Inbound picture messages render inline. You can dictate a text instead of typing it, using the microphone icon in the composer.

Call someone

Click the call button at the top of a conversation, or use + New › Phone Call with the dialpad, to place the call directly from your browser (allow microphone access when prompted). While on a call, the in-call strip shows the running duration with mute and hang-up controls. Completed calls are recorded automatically; the recording, transcript, and AI summary land in the thread shortly after you hang up.

Group calls

Calling from a conversation with more than one participant places a group call: everyone is dialed at once and joined into one conference the moment they pick up. The in-call strip shows each person's live state, ringing, on call, declined, or no answer, and hanging up ends the call for everyone. The thread's call entry keeps each person's outcome and how long they were on the line.

To start a group call, first add participants to the thread by clicking the conversation header to edit participants, then use the call button. The dialpad is for one-person calls only.

Live transcript during a call

While you're on a call in the browser, a live transcript pane under the in-call strip shows what both sides are saying as it's recognized, your lines labeled "You" and the other side labeled by speaker. It uses the voice-to-text credential you chose at Settings › Voice-to-Text, which also decides which account is billed for the audio minutes. If you haven't set one up, the pane shows a quiet notice that live transcript is unavailable instead.

When the call ends, the live transcript becomes the call's saved transcript in the thread, with no second pass needed, and the AI summary is written from it. Calls answered on a forwarded cell phone don't get a live transcript; their transcript still arrives after the call, from the recording.

Incoming calls and routing

When your firm's line rings, you get a ringing banner in the app with Answer and Decline; answering takes the call in the browser. Each line's Routing settings, on the Lines view, decide who rings and how:

If nobody answers, the caller hears the line's voicemail greeting and can leave a message. The voicemail, with its transcript, lands in the thread, and everyone on the line gets a missed-call notification.

Connect a Quo line instead

The Quo channel mirrors an existing Quo (formerly OpenPhone) workspace.

  1. Go to Settings › Connections › Quo and paste your API key.
  2. Your lines, conversations, and call history sync in; a banner shows progress on the first connect.

New activity arrives live afterward. If your Quo account holds several phone numbers, a number filter above the conversation list narrows the view to one line. If import ever stops and asks you to re-paste your API key, doing that on the same Connections page restarts it.

Who your texts appear to be from

A Quo phone line is shared, so everyone at the firm texts through the same number, and Quo labels each outgoing text with the team member who sent it. Bitment matches your Bitment email addresses against the members of your Quo workspace to identify you; the Quo connection page states which member it matched. If it couldn't match you, that page says so, and until it's fixed your texts show up in Quo under whoever owns the phone number. Fix it by adding your Quo account's email address to your Bitment account (Settings › Account), then re-pasting your API key on Settings › Connections › Quo.

Find a client's Quo conversations

Open a client in Clients and pick Quo under its Coordination group to see that client's Quo threads only, matched automatically whenever a participant's phone number equals the client's number or one of its contacts' numbers, plus any thread you've linked by hand.

  1. Open the conversation and click the contact's name to open their profile panel.
  2. Its Client section shows which client the number resolved to, or lets you connect it: Add to CRM to save the number onto a contact or the client record, add the person as a new contact, or create a new client.
  3. For group texts or numbers that shouldn't enter the CRM, use Or link this conversation only to file just the thread, under the client or one of its contacts.
  4. Manage on a matched or linked thread reopens the same picker.

Starting a new text stays on the main Phone › Quo view; the client page is for reading and replying.

Unread, read, and pinning on Quo

Right-click a conversation in the Quo list for Mark as read (also clears the unread indicator in your Quo account), Mark as unread (a Bitment-only marker, since Quo has no unread endpoint), and Pin conversation (keeps a thread at the top of the list regardless of its last message, and is Bitment-only organization that never changes anything in Quo). On native Bitment lines, right-click an unread thread for Mark as read.

Picture messages

An image someone texts you shows inline in the thread. Click it to open a full preview with a download button, the same preview used for file attachments elsewhere. Images are stored by Bitment itself, so they keep working even after Quo's own media links expire.

Calls, recordings, and internal comments

Call history sits inline in the conversation. Where a call was recorded, its entry carries the recording, transcript, and AI summary, so you can read what was said without listening back. Any message or call can carry an internal comment thread with @-mentions, visible only to your team, and text messages take emoji reactions.

Billing

Native lines bill the owning firm through Tokens: the monthly number rental, call minutes, and text segments each appear in the usage ledger, and the Limits tab can cap phone spend like any other kind of usage.

AI

The AI can read your conversations and call history on both channels. Drafting a text and staging it for your approval before it sends is available on Quo today, including starting a brand-new conversation with someone you haven't texted yet, not only replying inside an existing thread. On native Bitment lines, the AI can read your conversations but can't yet send on your behalf.

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