AI receptionist
An AI receptionist that books calls, not just takes names.
An AI receptionist is a voice agent that answers your phone, knows your services, hours and prices, books into your real calendar and hands over to a person when it should. A good one answers in about one ring, checks live availability rather than promising a callback, escalates anything sensitive, and puts a transcript of every call in your inbox within a minute. The reason to buy one is arithmetic: a missed call is a client who rang the next firm on the list, so work out what one new client is worth to you and how many rang last month. The market runs from about $5,000 to $15,000 for a scoped custom build; ours is $2,500 to $14,000 across three contiguous sizes, plus from $250/mo, with call minutes and model usage on top at cost.
New line We have not delivered one of these for a client yet, and we would rather say so here than have you find out later.
What separates a useful one from expensive voicemail
The difference is almost never the voice. It is whether the agent is connected to anything. An agent that cannot see your calendar can only promise a callback, which is exactly what the answering service you replaced was doing.
- It books real slots, checking live availability, and sends the confirmation itself.
- It knows your prices, your hours and the twenty questions you are genuinely asked, not a generic script.
- It hands over to a human the moment anyone asks, and on anything on your escalation list.
- It says "I do not know" instead of inventing an answer about your availability or your fees.
- Every call is transcribed and summarised to your inbox, so you can check what it actually said.
Where it should not be used
Being specific about this matters more than the upside, because the failure mode is reputational rather than merely annoying.
Never for advice of any kind, legal, financial or medical. Never for taking payment or card details. Never as the front line for genuinely emergency-led work. And it is not a replacement for a good receptionist you already have: it is a replacement for the calls nobody was answering.
What it costs to buy and to run
Two numbers, and most vendors will only show you the first. Setup is the build: your script, your escalation rules, the calendar connection and the testing. The market runs from about $5,000 to $15,000 for a scoped custom build. Ours is $2,500 to $14,000 across three contiguous sizes, published, with the size driven by how many services it has to know, how many calendars and systems it has to reach, and how much can go wrong if it gets one wrong.
The second number is the running cost, and it is real because voice has a genuine per-minute price. A monthly fee covers keeping it working as the models change; the call minutes and model usage sit on top at cost. At small-firm volume that is usually tens of dollars a month rather than hundreds, and anyone unwilling to estimate it for you before you sign is telling you something.
What it is worth, and who measured it
21×
A lead contacted within five minutes was 21 times more likely to qualify than one contacted after thirty. Most small firms reply the next working day.
7×
Firms that responded to a web lead within an hour were nearly seven times more likely to qualify it. In the same audit, 23% of firms never responded at all.
These are findings from published research on the wider market, measured by the people named beside each one. They are not results we are promising you, and we do not have client results of our own to show yet, which we would rather say plainly than dress up.
Questions
What is an AI receptionist?
A voice agent that answers your phone, knows your services, hours and prices, books into your real calendar, takes structured messages and hands over to a person when it should. Unlike an answering service it can complete the booking rather than promising a callback.
How much does an AI receptionist cost?
The market runs from about $5,000 to $15,000 for a scoped custom build, plus a monthly fee for keeping it working, plus call minutes and model usage at cost. Ours is $2,500 to $14,000 in three contiguous sizes, published, plus from $250/mo, and we estimate the running cost at your own call volume before you commit. The number that matters more is on your side: what one new client is worth, against how many calls went unanswered last month.
Will callers know it is not a person?
Most will work it out, and we think it should say so, because a firm caught pretending is in a much worse position than one that was upfront. In practice callers mind far less than firms expect, provided it is genuinely useful and a human is one sentence away.
What happens if it gets something wrong?
You see it, because every call is transcribed to your inbox within a minute. The fix is in the design rather than the apology: it is not allowed to give advice, quote outside an agreed range or take payment, and anything sensitive goes to a person.
Related
- AI chatbot for business A business AI chatbot answers visitor questions using your own pages and documents rather than the open internet, states plainly when the answer is not in its material, qualifies the visitor against criteria you set, and books into your real calendar or hands over with everything already captured.
- AI automation agency An AI automation agency builds the software that removes repetitive work from a business: it maps a process, connects the systems that process touches, and replaces the manual steps with code and language models.
- AI agency An AI agency designs and builds the systems a business runs on and makes them legible to AI, rather than advising on it from the outside.
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