Two facts coexist in most independent businesses. The owner cares intensely about what people say. And the review page is full of unanswered messages, because answering well, in two languages, at eleven at night, is real work. The gap between those two facts is not a character flaw. It is a workload problem, and workload problems are what tools are for.
Why the reply matters more than the review
A hard review costs less than it seems, and an ignored one costs more. Readers scan reviews in bulk; what they remember is the pattern of the answers: whether the house responds, whether it responds like a person, whether criticism is met with grace or with a lawyer's shrug.
The reply is the only part of the page you control. Treating it as optional hands your storefront's tone to whoever had the worst evening.
What the assistant actually does
You paste in the review or the client message. The assistant, tuned once to the voice of your house, your formality, your warmth, your signature phrases, drafts three different replies, each in French and in English. One tends to be warm, one brief, one for the difficult cases: apologetic where deserved, firm where not.
You pick, tweak a word if you like, publish. The assistant never posts on its own, because the signature at the bottom is yours, and readers can tell.
The two-language reality
In most Canadian cities your clients arrive in both languages, and so do their reviews. Answering French with English, or the reverse, is a small daily loss of warmth. Drafting in both by default costs the assistant nothing and returns something subtle: every client is answered in the language they chose, and bilingual readers see a house at ease in both.
Tone is the whole product
A generic reply engine produces replies that smell generic, which is worse than silence: it tells readers the gratitude is automated. The setup work that matters is the tone file: how your house says thank you, how it apologizes, what it never says. That file is written once, with you, and it is what makes draft three hundred sound like draft one.
It also means the tool is yours in the deepest sense: another builder could host it, but the voice in it belongs to your house.