AI receptionist
It answers the calls your team cannot. At lunch, after close, on a Sunday, and when every line is already busy.
From $199/month. Billed per booked job. Two weeks free on your own number.
A dental practice manager once showed me her phone log for a Monday. Forty-one inbound calls. The front desk answered twenty-six. Of the fifteen that rang out, eleven came between 12:30 and 1:30, while the desk was at lunch, and four came after six.
She had been told for years that she needed a better phone system. What she needed was someone at the desk during lunch, which is not a phone system problem and was not in anyone's budget.
That hour is what an AI receptionist is for. Not better hold music. Not a bigger voicemail box. A voice that picks up on the first ring while your team is eating, driving, or already on another line.
What an AI receptionist actually is
An AI receptionist is a voice agent that answers your business line, greets the caller, handles the questions you get asked every week, books into your calendar, and hands the difficult calls to a person. It answers in one ring at any hour and takes several calls at the same time.
It answers calls coming in. If what you need is something that rings leads before they go cold, that is the AI appointment setter, which works the other direction. Businesses that run both usually find the receptionist protects revenue they have already won and the setter goes out after more.
The missed-call arithmetic
The numbers behind this are unglamorous. Industry surveys put unanswered calls at roughly a quarter of all calls to small service businesses, and the shops with the busiest technicians tend to do worse, because the person best placed to answer the phone is usually the person already holding a tool.
The second number is the one that hurts. Most people who reach voicemail do not leave a message and do not ring back. They dial the next business on the list. So a missed call is rarely a delayed job. Most of the time it is a job that quietly went somewhere else.
Run your own version of that arithmetic before you believe anyone's marketing, including ours. Take your missed-call count for one week from your phone provider, multiply by your average job value, then by the share you would realistically have won. Whatever that number is, it is the only business case that matters here.
What happens on the call
- It answers in one ring, with your greeting, at whatever hour the phone goes.
- It works out what the caller wants: book something, ask a price, chase an existing job, or reach a specific person.
- For a booking, it reads live calendar availability, offers real slots, and takes the details you need captured.
- For a question it knows, it answers. For a question it does not, it says so instead of guessing, and takes a message or transfers.
- For anything you have flagged as urgent or high value, it transfers to a person and passes on what it already heard.
- Afterwards the transcript, the outcome, and the next step land in your CRM.
This is not an answering service
Most owners I talk to think they have already solved this, because they pay for an answering service. The two things are not the same product.
An answering service takes a name and a number and emails it to you. You still have to ring back. By then the appointment is booked elsewhere or the problem is fixed. What you bought was a politer voicemail.
A receptionist, AI or human, closes the loop on the call itself. It checks real availability, books the slot, captures what you need, and confirms before the caller hangs up. If a product only takes messages, it is an answering service with a new badge, whatever the website says.
What it costs
Billing is per booked job, not per minute and not per seat. It starts at $199/month for up to 25 booked jobs, which works out at $7.96 a job at the top of that band. There are 15 bands and the rate falls as volume rises, down to $3.30 at the top. Minutes are unlimited, seats are unlimited, and there is no setup fee.
That matters more than it sounds. On per-minute pricing, a caller who rambles for nine minutes and books nothing is revenue for the vendor and a loss for you. Here it costs you nothing.
Against a human hire the comparison is not really about money, though the money is favourable. It is about hours. A front-desk person covers the hours you pay them for, one call at a time. The agent covers the other hours and the overlapping calls. The useful question is not which is cheaper, it is how many of your calls arrive when nobody is there to answer.
Where it falls down
Four things worth knowing before the trial.
- It will not do what a good receptionist does. It does not recognise a regular's voice, notice someone is upset, or know that the Thursday caller always wants the early slot.
- Integration is the real constraint, not the voice. If your booking system has no usable API, it cannot read live availability, and a receptionist that cannot see your diary is a message-taker.
- Strong accents, noisy backgrounds, and weak mobile signal still cause problems.
- If your phone rarely rings, this is the wrong product. You want outbound. The appointment setter calls out instead of waiting.
It is different in every trade
The specifics change more than you would think between trades. A plumbing shop needs emergency triage at 2am and a sensible call-out fee quoted to price-shoppers. A dental practice needs insurance questions handled and a cancellation list worked. A law firm needs intake questions and a clear line it does not cross on advice.
We write these up one trade at a time rather than pretending one script fits everyone. The city and trade pages below cover licensing, seasonal call patterns, and what counts as an emergency in each market.
Questions people ask before they buy
What is an AI receptionist?
An AI receptionist is a voice agent that answers your business line, greets the caller, answers the questions you get asked twenty times a week, books into your calendar, and passes the hard calls to a person. It answers in one ring, at any hour, and takes several calls at once.
What does an AI receptionist cost?
From $199/month for up to 25 booked jobs, which is $7.96 a job at the top of that band. There are 15 bands and the rate falls as volume rises, down to $3.30 a job at the top. Minutes and seats are unlimited and there is no setup fee, so a long call that books nothing does not cost you more.
Will callers know it is an AI?
Some will. It answers in one ring, talks at a normal pace, and copes with interruptions, so plenty of callers never ask. When someone does ask, it tells them it is an AI assistant. We will not have it claim to be a person who works for you.
Does it replace my front-desk staff?
Usually not. It takes the calls your team physically cannot: the ones arriving at lunch, after close, on Sunday, or while all your lines are busy. Your receptionist keeps the walk-ins and the conversations that need judgement. Most businesses find the overlap is smaller than they feared.
Does it work with my practice-management system?
It connects to Google Calendar, Outlook, Salesforce, HubSpot and around 200 other tools over API or SIP. Clinic and practice systems vary a lot, and some have no usable API at all. Send us the name of yours before you buy rather than after. If it cannot read live availability, say so early and we will tell you.
What happens on a call it cannot handle?
It transfers to a person and passes on what it already heard, so the caller does not start again from the beginning. You set the rules for what counts as a transfer: a named emergency, a VIP, a specific question, or simply the caller asking for a human.
Can it handle several callers at once?
Yes, and this is the part a human front desk cannot match. During a cold snap or a campaign spike, ten people ringing at once all get answered. A busy tone is a lost customer who is already dialling the next name on the list.
What about accents and bad phone lines?
Better than two years ago and still not perfect. Strong regional accents, noisy sites, and poor mobile reception are where it struggles most. Run it on your own calls for a fortnight and you will hear exactly where your caller base sits.
Which languages does it speak?
Over 50, with the same voice quality in each. In practice most businesses use two: the local language and whichever second language their callers actually speak. Worth checking during the trial rather than taking the number on faith.
How long until it is live?
Two weeks, free, on your own number and your own calendar. A call to capture how you greet people and what you want booked, a few days of build, then live calls you listen back to. There is no card and no setup fee.
By trade
What counts as an emergency, what has to be captured on the first call and where the agent is weak all change by trade. These pages cover each one.
By city and trade
Licensing, seasonal call patterns and what counts as an emergency all differ by market. These pages cover the specifics.
Put it on your line for a fortnight
Book 20 minutes and we will set it up against your own number and calendar. If it handles your callers badly, a fortnight is a cheap way to find that out.
Book the call