AI Receptionist

An AI receptionist is software that answers phone calls — and often WhatsApp and website chats too — on a business’s behalf, holds a real conversation instead of playing a fixed menu, and hands off or logs what happened for a human to pick up.

The distinction that matters is between this and an answering service or IVR menu. An answering service is a human being paid to pick up when a business can’t; an IVR plays “press 1 for sales” and routes on a keypress. An AI receptionist understands what a caller actually says, answers routine questions from the business’s own information, and only escalates what genuinely needs a person.

Coverage is the usual reason a business looks at one: calls that arrive while staff are with a customer, after closing, or in a language nobody on shift speaks well. What it replaces is not a person’s judgement on a hard call — it is the gap where nobody was answering at all.

See how this works as a phone agent on the AI phone agent feature page.