The limits are the useful part of the spec
Every vendor in this category publishes what their assistant can do. The list that would actually help you buy is the other one.
The short version
- It cannot exercise judgment. A call requiring a decision with money or risk attached needs a person.
- It does not know your regulars, and it will not read a caller's tone the way an experienced front-desk person does.
- It handles English at launch here. A caller who switches language mid-call is a problem to plan for, not a feature.
- It cannot fix a capacity problem. Answering more calls you cannot service makes the problem visible rather than smaller.
Judgment, and why it is not a roadmap item
A caller asks whether you can do the job cheaper. A caller implies they might sue. A caller is upset about work you did last month. Each of those is a decision with consequences attached, and each is a call that should reach a person quickly rather than be handled well by software.
This is not a limitation waiting to be engineered away. It is a question of who is accountable for the answer. A business that lets software make commitments has moved a risk rather than removed one, and we would rather configure the assistant to recognize those calls and hand them over.
Practically, that means writing your transfer rules around the calls you would not want a new employee handling on their first day. That is a good test and most businesses have not applied it.
The things it does worse than a person, permanently
It does not know that the caller is the customer whose installation went wrong in March, unless you have told it. A good front-desk person carries a mental model of your customer base that no configuration reproduces.
It does not hear that someone is upset before they say so. Tone carries information that a transcript loses, and an experienced receptionist acts on it two sentences before the caller gets to the point.
It will not improvise around a situation nobody anticipated. It follows the rules you wrote, which is a strength for consistency and a weakness the first time reality goes somewhere your rules did not.
And it does not build a relationship. For some businesses that is most of what the phone is for, and those businesses should be buying a human service rather than this one.
Where we would tell you not to use it
Crisis intake. A law firm taking calls from people in acute distress, a clinic handling urgent clinical questions, anything where the first thirty seconds carry real risk. Several firms run the assistant on overflow and out of hours only for exactly this reason, and that is a sensible configuration rather than a compromise.
Any conversation that needs clinical detail. Our own industry pages scope the assistant to inquiries and scheduling, with clinical content staying in the practice's system, and that is a deliberate limit rather than a gap we are working on.
Languages we have not verified. English is what we support at launch. If a large share of your callers speak Spanish, Dialzara handles it today and that is the honest recommendation.
And any business where the phone is not actually the problem. Look at where last month's inquiries came from before buying anything, including ours.
What we cannot tell you about our own limits
Hear it handle one of your own calls
Your scenario, your greeting, a couple of minutes.