Short answer
An AI receptionist is software that answers your business phone and holds a spoken conversation with the caller. It answers questions from information you approved, takes the details, and either transfers to a person or leaves you a message, on rules you set.
It is not a phone tree. Nobody presses one for sales. The caller talks the way they would to a person, and the agent answers, asks what it needs, and does the thing you told it to do with that call.
It is also not a chatbot with a phone number. The useful part is the rules underneath: what counts as an emergency at your company, who is on call on a Saturday, which questions it may answer and which it must hand over, what it is never allowed to say. Those come out of a setup conversation and get written into the agent, which is why the build takes work rather than an afternoon.
What it does well: answering every call at once, at three in the morning, in the same tone every time, without getting tired at the end of a long week. What it does not do is judgement. A call that needs somebody to think gets handed to somebody who can, and defining where that line sits is most of what setup is for.
Settle it in ninety seconds
Call the demo line and talk to the agent yourself. It is the same system that would answer your phone, running live, and it will tell you it is AI if you ask it.
Related questions
- Will my customers know they are talking to AI?
- Can an AI answering service transfer emergency calls to a real person?
- How much does an AI answering service cost?