Call Temporal Anchor Auditor

call-temporal-anchor-auditor

A promise with no calendar anchor is a no-show waiting to happen.

CALL-E's highest-value calls are bookings: appointment-confirm, no-show-shield, slotsaver, capacity-backfill-cascade all live or die on whether the person on the other end walks in at the right slot. An agent that closes with "see you tomorrow evening" or "your pickup is Tuesday at 2" has exchanged a calendar anchor for a vibe - and each unanchored minute is paid for later as a missed appointment, an idle bay, or a double-booked table. This skill grades every time reference in the agent's own turns and tells you which commitments would not survive a calendar check.

When To Use

• after any booking, confirmation, or appointment call, ideally with --called-at set to the run's ISO-8601 start time so relative phrases ("tomorrow", "next month") resolve against a real reference date
• whenever the transcript shows commitments but you cannot say, from the text alone, which calendar day and clock time the agent actually locked in
• before placing the next wave of calls, to craft a plan_call goal that forces absolute-time discipline (weekday + date + clock + meridiem)

When Not To Use

• without --called-at when the relative phrases matter: without a reference time they grade unresolvable_without_call_time and weekday-date pair checks are skipped - if you know when the call ran, pass the flag
• on non-English transcripts; the temporal lexicons are English-only
• to prove the callee misunderstood the time; the card grades the agent's wording only, never the callee's comprehension or intent
• during a call; strictly post-call analysis plus pre-call goal crafting

Verdicts

How It Works

python3 scripts/call_temporal_anchor_auditor.py analyze \
  --call-result path/to/call-result.json \
  --called-at 2026-10-07T09:00:00-07:00

Reads the real get_call_run result shape ({status, result: {transcript}}) or a bare JSON array of {speaker, text} turns. Only AGENT turns are audited; callee time mentions are counted but never graded.

Collection classes:

• absolute_date: "October 14", "the 14th of October", "10/14" (US MM/DD), and bare ordinal days ("the 14th") whose month is inferred from the call timestamp
• clock_absolute: clock times with meridiem ("at 2 p.m."), canonicalized to 24h values; meridiem-less forms are clock_ambiguous - "at 2" and colon times at or below 12 ("at 2:30") could be morning or afternoon, while 13-23 colon times ("14:30") are true 24-hour clocks
• invalid_date: a calendar date that does not exist in the call year ("February 29" in 2026) - never satisfies anchoring
• band: day-part phrases ("in the evening", "tomorrow morning", "at noon")
  • vague on their own, no clock inside
• relative_resolved / relative_derived: "tomorrow", "in two weeks", "a week from today", bare weekdays - resolved only with --called-at; a bare weekday resolves to the next strictly future occurrence and is never guessed for "next/this <weekday>", which is flagged ambiguous (dialect-dependent)
• unresolvable_without_call_time: relatives and bare ordinal days seen with no --called-at

Resolution rules worth knowing:

• "next month" resolves to the same day next month, clamped to the target month's end (Jan 31 -> Feb 28 in non-leap years)
• a bare weekday never resolves to today; strictly future, at least tomorrow
• "next <weekday>" and "this <weekday>" are never resolved; their meaning varies by dialect, so they always flag

Conflict rules (any one forces INTERNAL_DATE_CONFLICT):

• (a) a weekday+date pair in one turn contradicts the calendar of the --called-at year ("Tuesday, October 14" when Oct 14 is a Wednesday)
• (b) the same resolved date is stated with different weekdays across turns
• (c) the same 12-hour clock number is restated with a different value or meridiem ("at 2" plus "at 3 p.m." both keyed to hour 12)

Commitment anchoring: turns matching commitment verbs (confirm, reserve, book, see you, pickup, appointment, ...) that carry time expressions get a RELATIVE_ONLY_COMMITMENT finding unless the slot reaches a full anchor - a date anchor plus a clock_absolute - which may live anywhere in the call; anchoring is call-level, so a restatement can lean on the anchor stated earlier.

Craft the absolute-time goal

python3 scripts/call_temporal_anchor_auditor.py craft \
  --task "confirm the catering pickup" \
  --date "Wednesday, October 14" --time "2 p.m."

Emits a plan_call goal whose time-discipline block demands weekday + calendar date + clock time + meridiem on every commitment, forbids bare "next <weekday>" and dateless "tomorrow", and requires the full anchor to be read back once. See references/example-goal.txt for a realistic result.