What is an AI receptionist and how does it work?

An AI receptionist is software that answers your business's calls and chats, understands what the customer wants, and does something about it: booking an appointment, taking an order, or capturing the details for a callback.

How it works

Under the hood, three things work together:

• Understanding: speech recognition turns a caller's words into text (chat starts as text), and a language model works out what they need.
• Knowledge: the agent is curated to your business, with your services, products, hours and policies, so it answers as you would.
• Actions: it uses connected tools, such as your calendar, product catalog and invoicing, to finish the job instead of just talking about it.

What it can do

• Answer questions about hours, services, pricing and products.
• Book appointments using live availability.
• Take orders and send a hosted payment invoice.
• Capture leads and hand the details to your team.
• Work around the clock, with no hold time.

How it differs from what you may already have

• A phone tree (IVR) makes callers press buttons. An AI receptionist holds a conversation.
• A chatbot usually deflects questions. An AI receptionist completes sales and bookings, and covers voice as well as chat.
• An answering service takes a message for a human to act on later. An AI receptionist can complete the action during the call.

What it can't do

It isn't a replacement for in-person service or for judgment calls that need a person. It also shouldn't handle regulated health information, and it should never take card numbers directly: payment belongs on the payment processor's hosted page.

Getting started

Setup typically means adding one snippet to your website, connecting your calendar and catalog, and curating the agent to your business. From there it runs on its own, and you can watch conversations and results from a dashboard.

See how Viravance sets this up.

Common questions