AI receptionist

What this category is

An AI receptionist is software that answers your business phone line the way a person would — picking up, understanding the caller, answering from what you actually sell, and handing off what it should not decide — rather than a missed-call bot that just fires an automated text after the fact.

Who should care

• Businesses where the person meant to answer the phone is usually doing something else.
• Anyone who has searched “ai receptionist” looking for the category itself, not a specific vendor.
• Businesses whose calls arrive outside the hours anyone is at the desk.

Read these, in order

• What an AI receptionist actually costs in India What does an AI receptionist cost in India, all in?
• An AI receptionist or hiring someone? Should I hire a receptionist or use an AI?
• The phone rings while you're with a customer What do I do about calls I can't answer while I'm working?
• Customers ask in a language your staff do not speak What happens when customers call in a language my staff don't speak?

What we build for this

• AI phone agent An assistant that answers your business phone on the first ring, in the caller’s own language, and leaves you a transcript, a summary and a contact record.
• Knowledge base Upload documents or paste text and the assistant answers from them, in your words, across every channel. Correct it once and every channel changes.
• Shared inbox Every conversation in one list, with a clear marker of whether you or the assistant is replying, and an atomic hand-over that cannot double-send.

Our own numbers, in one place

Every figure we publish — pricing, channels, languages and limits — is on one dated page with a link to where you can verify each row, and an equivalent JSON export if you would rather not read a table. See the published facts.

This hub in other markets

• United States AI receptionist for small business

Related topics

• Missed call management What to do about calls nobody answers: how to size the loss with your own numbers, the four common fixes, and how to tell whether any of them is worth paying for.
• WhatsApp for business How WhatsApp enquiries actually behave, the 24-hour window nobody explains until it bites, and what can safely be handled without you.
• Multilingual service What breaks when an enquiry arrives in a language nobody at the desk speaks, why vendor language lists mean very little, and what to test instead.
• What it costs The four cost lines every quote in this market contains, which ones get quietly omitted, and calculators for working out your own number.
• Choosing a vendor The questions that actually separate vendors in this market — none of which are on a feature comparison table.
• WhatsApp chatbot What a WhatsApp chatbot actually needs to do — answer inside Meta’s 24-hour window, keep one customer’s history together, and know when to stop and hand off — and how that differs from a drag-and-drop bot builder.
• WhatsApp automation The reply, the record and the re-engagement template that fires outside the 24-hour window — what automating WhatsApp actually covers, and what it deliberately does not (a list you send a broadcast to).
• Instagram automation What an Instagram automation tool should do — answer DMs immediately, in your voice, tied to a real customer record — versus a keyword-triggered bot that only ever replies to comments.
• AI chatbot for business What separates an AI chatbot from a keyword-matching bot script: it reads what a customer actually typed, answers from what the business actually sells, and knows when to stop and hand off.
• AI sales agent What an AI sales agent actually is — an assistant that talks to a prospect and moves them toward a quote — and why that is a different category from a CRM, a pipeline board, or sales-force-automation software.