What Is an AI Receptionist, and How Does It Answer Business Calls?

Short answer: an AI receptionist is a voice agent that answers your business phone number and holds a normal spoken conversation with the caller. It answers questions from the information you give it, takes a message or a booking, records the caller's details, and transfers the call to a person when the caller needs one. Every call ends with a transcript and an outcome in your console, so nothing said on the phone is lost.

Why businesses use one

Most small teams cannot answer every call. The phone rings while someone is with a customer, on a job, or out of hours, and a caller who reaches voicemail often rings the next business instead. An AI receptionist answers every call at any hour, deals with the routine ones itself, and passes on the ones that need you with the details already written down. It works the same for a clinic in London, a contractor in New York, a salon in Dubai or a shop in Pune.

How it answers a call, step by step

1. The call comes in on your number. The agent picks up with the greeting you wrote, for example "Thanks for calling Riverside Dental, how can I help?" Write the greeting so callers know who they have reached; the agent does not announce anything you have not written.
2. It listens and works out what the caller wants. A question about opening hours, prices or parking, a new booking, a change to an appointment, or a problem that needs a person.
3. It answers from your own information. You give it a knowledge base: your website, a sitemap, pasted text or uploaded files. It answers from that, and you can tell it to say so, and offer a callback, when the answer is not there.
4. It takes action. Through tool calling it can check open slots and book them (Google Calendar through Cal.com, or your own booking system through its API), look up an order, or record a lead with the caller's name, number, email and what they need.
5. It hands over when it should. A caller who asks for a person, or a conversation you have marked as one for your team, can be transferred to a colleague's phone.
6. You see what happened. Every call has a transcript and an outcome. Recording is a switch you turn on per agent, and it is off by default.

More than the phone

The same agent can answer your website chat, WhatsApp and Telegram, with one memory of each customer. A caller who messaged you on WhatsApp last week is matched by phone number, and the agent can say "we've spoken on WhatsApp before" while holding back what was said until the person is verified. Conversations that need a person land in a shared inbox where your team can take over.

What an AI receptionist will not do

• It only knows what you give it. Keep its knowledge base up to date, and tell it what to do when a question is not covered.
• It does not give professional advice you have not written into its instructions. Route medical, legal or financial questions to a person.
• Transfer to a person works on Plivo and Telnyx numbers, and on numbers bought from us in India. An imported Twilio number answers and holds the whole conversation, but cannot transfer the call.

Languages

Voice agents speak 50 languages, including English with British and American accents, Arabic, Spanish, French and Hindi, plus all 22 scheduled Indian languages for India. Pick a voice from a searchable library by language, accent, gender and age.

What you need to start

A phone number (in the US, UK, UAE and elsewhere, import your own Twilio, Telnyx or Plivo number; in India, buy one from us or import your own), your website or a few documents for the knowledge base, and a greeting. See the AI receptionist page for how it fits together, the voice AI agent page for everything the agent can do on a call, and pricing for plans.