What is an AI receptionist?

Three pieces run in sequence on every call. Speech recognition turns what the caller said into text, a language model works out what they want and what to say back, and speech synthesis says it aloud.

The part that distinguishes a good one is what happens at the edges. A caller who asks something outside the brief should be handed over, not guessed at.

It is an inbound tool. Answering calls that come to you sits in a different legal and practical world from placing calls to people who did not ask for them.

Say you run a garage door company and the office closes at 5. At 7:42 pm a homeowner calls because her door won't close and her car is parked halfway out. The assistant picks up, says it's the company's automated assistant, and asks how it can help. She explains the whole thing in one breathless sentence.

By 7:43 it has her name, her callback number and her address, and it has asked the one question your instructions told it to ask: is the door stuck open or stuck shut? Open doors count as urgent in your rules, so it offers tomorrow's first slot, 8:00 am, and she takes it. At 7:45 the call ends. You get a short summary, the full transcript, and a new 8:00 am booking on the calendar, all without anyone on your team touching a phone.

Starter is $49 a month for 200 answered calls, which comes to about 25 cents a call. If one booked job is worth $150 to you, a single recovered evening call covers three months. That's the easy case: lots of short, similar calls, many of them arriving when you can't pick up.

It's a weaker fit when you get fifteen calls a month and know every caller by name. Software also struggles to earn its fee when most calls need judgment nobody can write down, like pricing a custom job by feel or calming a long-time client who's upset. In those businesses, a person answering is part of what the customer pays for.

Here's a fair test. List your last twenty calls and mark each one you could have handled from a written page of instructions. With twelve or more marks, an assistant will carry real weight. Under six, you mostly need a better voicemail habit.

GreetKeeper answers inbound calls only, at any hour, and books into your calendar during the call rather than promising a callback.

It can announce itself as an assistant in the opening line, which Maine's chatbot law effectively requires and Utah requires verbally for regulated occupations.

Every call arrives as a transcript plus a short summary. Plans start at $49 a month for 200 answered calls, with the overage rate printed next to each tier.