An AI phone assistant that answers when your team can't

An AI receptionist is an AI phone assistant that answers calls the way a receptionist would: it asks what the caller needs, answers standard questions, books or moves an appointment, takes a callback request or puts the caller through to the right colleague. After the call it adds a summary to your CRM or helpdesk, so your team knows what was discussed.

Yes. An AI phone assistant picks up, holds a conversation in everyday language and handles whatever is clear-cut: a question about opening hours, moving an appointment, a callback request. Anything that isn't, such as a complaint or a tricky question, it puts through to a colleague. Callers hear at the start that they are talking to an AI assistant, and they can always ask for a person.

Voicebot often means a phone menu: press 1 for sales, press 2 for support, or a system that only recognises set phrases. An AI phone assistant holds a conversation. It understands what the caller says, even when they phrase it differently, and it can act in your systems, such as putting an appointment in the calendar. The word voicebot is now used for both. If a good phone menu is enough for your callers, we'll tell you.

Part of the job, not the whole role. An AI phone assistant handles the clear-cut calls, including outside office hours and when everyone is already on the phone. A front desk does more than answer the phone: welcoming visitors, dealing with complaints, working out what someone really needs. Often the assistant takes the overflow and the evening hours, while your colleagues handle the conversations where a person makes the difference.

It mainly depends on how many kinds of calls the assistant has to handle, which systems it works with (phone system, calendar, CRM or helpdesk) and how many exceptions there are. An assistant that takes callback requests out of hours is a different project from one that books appointments across several calendars. On our cost page for AI agents you answer a few questions and get a reasoned estimate.

That depends on your phone system. With VoIP and cloud telephony you can usually forward calls to the assistant, for example after closing time or when nobody picks up within a few rings. Putting a caller through to a colleague then goes through the same system. How that works with your setup is something we work out in the first conversation, before anything is built.

A call may only be recorded or transcribed if the caller is told beforehand and you have a lawful basis for it. We agree those points before the assistant goes live: whether calls are recorded, what goes into the transcript and the summary, where it is stored and how long it is kept. The assistant asks for no more information than the call needs. Your Tech Club is ISO 27001 certified; that covers how we work and does not replace agreements with your own data protection officer.

Yes. The assistant checks which slots are free, suggests a few and books the appointment, or moves an existing one. That works with Outlook (Microsoft 365) or Google Calendar, or with the scheduling in your own system. Which calendars it may see and what it may change is set for each calendar.

An assistant can hold conversations in more than one language. Which languages work well enough for your callers is something we test with trial calls before it goes live. If a language doesn't work well enough, it puts those callers through rather than helping them halfway.