Your phone stops ringing out

The number worth sitting with before any of the rest of this page is not a Kooday number at all: how much a business actually loses when nobody picks up. Invoca’s own 2025 benchmark analysis of call-tracking data puts the home-services miss rate at 27% — roughly one call in four never reaches a person, in an industry built on the phone ringing. India has no equivalent published benchmark we can cite, so the honest version of this page does not claim a local figure; it claims the mechanism — a phone that rings out is a phone that sends the caller to whoever answers next, and that is true regardless of country.

The comparison that actually matters for a Kerala or Kochi business is not against a call centre in another country. It is against the receptionist you would otherwise hire. Indeed’s own India salary data puts a Kerala receptionist at roughly 14,123 rupees a month across 206 reported salaries; load the statutory employer costs — EPF, ESI, gratuity accrual — on top and the fully-loaded number is closer to 15,840 rupees. The part that number hides is hours: one person covers about 48 of the week’s 168, which is why a business open evenings, weekends or during lunch is already running short-staffed by design, not by accident. Covering the full week properly needs roughly three and a half people before anyone takes leave or falls sick.

Smith.ai, a US virtual-receptionist vendor, publishes both a human product and an AI product side by side, and the gap between its own two price sheets is more persuasive than anything we could say about ourselves: its human tier works out to about $10 per call, its AI tier to about $2 per call, from the same company, for a materially similar job. We are not Smith.ai and we do not sell in dollars per call — Kooday’s own price is on the table below, resolved from the same registry that bills a live account, not typed in for this page — but the shape of that gap is the same shape a phone agent changes for any business paying a person by the hour to answer a phone that rings unevenly through the day.

None of this is a claim that the assistant is a receptionist in every sense. It does not make tea for a walk-in, it does not notice a regular patient looks unwell, and it will not use its judgement on something you never told it about. What it does is answer every time, in the language the caller used, and write down what happened — which is the specific, narrow thing a missed call costs you, call after call, at whatever hour the call happens to arrive.

Three voice engines exist because no single one is right for every accent, on every plan. Gemini Live is a fused speech-to-speech model — audio in, audio out, one model doing both jobs at once — and it is the default because that fusion is what makes it fast. OpenAI Realtime is the same shape, full-duplex, with its own reasoning-effort setting available per bot. The third option is not fused at all: Sarvam Saaras converts speech to text in codemix mode, meaning it does not force a caller into one language before it can understand them; Gemini Flash reasons over that text; Sarvam Bulbul turns the reply back into speech; and a local voice-activity detector decides when the caller has actually stopped talking rather than guessing from a fixed pause length. That cascade exists specifically because a model trained mostly on English and a handful of major languages does not track Malayalam-English code-switching as reliably as a pipeline built for it end to end. Gemini Live and the Sarvam cascade are available on every plan; OpenAI Realtime is a Growth-and-above engine — it ships with the plan, not sold separately, so choosing it on a lower tier means upgrading first, not paying an add-on.

One phone line, four ways to staff it

Option	Monthly	Priced per	What it covers
Kooday (Lite → Starter for a phone number)	From ₹99/mo, phone number from ₹999/mo	₹6/min pay-as-you-go, every minute metered	Every call, every day, no per-call ceiling
Smith.ai AI receptionist (Pro)	$150/mo	~$2.00/call after ~75 calls	~2–3 calls/day, one product, month-to-month
Smith.ai human receptionist (Starter)	$300/mo	~$10.00/call after 30 calls	30 live-answered calls, then per-call overage
Kerala receptionist, fully loaded	~15,840 rupees/mo	One person	48 of 168 weekly hours — ~3.5 people needed for full coverage

Kooday’s row is resolved from the pricing registry at build time; the other three are read from each publisher’s own page on 2026-09-08. The units differ on purpose — a call, a month, an hour of coverage — so read the “covers” column before comparing totals.