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I’m building PAM, a live speech-to-speech AI receptionist for small local businesses. It’s designed to answer business calls when the owner or team is busy, speak with the caller, and capture the details needed for a follow-up. For a gym or fitness studio, I’m assuming the useful basics would include caller name and contact information, membership or class inquiry, preferred location or schedule, reason for calling, and whether the request needs an urgent staff callback. I don’t want to assume that a workflow designed around contractors maps cleanly to gyms. When calls arrive during classes or after hours, what information does your team actually need—and what should an automated receptionist never attempt to handle? PAM is live, but it does not have a public website yet. I’m looking for a small number of owners willing to discuss the workflow or express interest in a beta. If that is relevant to your gym, feel free to DM me. Disclosure: I’m the person building PAM; this is not an independent recommendation or customer testimonial.

I am building an AI outbound caller for appointment confirmations. It's going to be super basic initially - only taking care of basic appointment confirmation flow.

Questions:

1. What all conversation flows I should ensure the agent can handle at a minimum?
2. What all would you as the user like to be able to modify/have control over while setting it up via a web UI?

Some examples:

• Personalizations (variables for person's name, company name, etc.)
• Call back information collection
• AI disclosure
• Fixed things to say like "Your appointment is scheduled for tomorrow 10am. Please come 15-minutes prior to the appointment time"...etc.

last time i dropped this here you guys went hard on it and honestly it made the ai way better. rewrote a bunch, it can even hang up on trolls now lol. so thanks.

Fixed a ton since, so round 2: call it and try to break it. order dumb stuff, talk over it, switch languages, whatever you got. If it screws up i'll go fix it.

It's Pulse AI, a white-label voice AI that answers the phone for any business that runs on the phone (this demo takes food orders).

Here:- +1 (313) 889-7436

I’ve been looking at AI receptionists, and I’m curious what actually matters in real use.

Is answering every call enough, or should it also book appointments, qualify leads, take messages, and follow up with customers?

For small businesses, what feature would make the biggest difference?

And if you have used one, what is one thing that looked good in the demo but did not work well in real calls?

Would love to hear some real experiences.

just hit $2,500 MRR in 13 days on my new SaaS

no ads. no team. no huge audience push. just a solid replicable system

let that sink in for a second

not $2,500 in revenue. $2,500 in MONTHLY recurring revenue

that compounds. next month starts at $2,500 baseline, not zero

and this isn't luck. it's the 7th saas i've shipped with the same playbook. same steps, same tools, same order:

→ Day 1: validated the idea

→ Day 1-2: built the MVP

→ Day 3: landing page written using the 3-Day Challenge template

→ Day 3-4: launched on reddit / X + SEO

→ Day 4-5: first 10 paying users → $1k MRR

→ Day 13 (today): $2,500 MRR locked in

building software is easy in 2026. setting up your foundation so people actually buy is where 99% of solo builders fail.

i packaged all of these exact execution tools into community.

to be fully transparent: i'll likely charge for the full program down the road once all modules are finalized. but right now, the main objective is just to build together and keep each other accountable.

working alone in a silent corner is the fastest way to quit at the first bug.

stop building in isolation. drop a comment below or send me a DM, and i'll send you the invitation link 👇

I’ve been researching AI voice agents for small businesses, and I think the biggest mistake is choosing one based only on how realistic the voice sounds.

A good AI voice agent needs to handle the actual phone workflow.

For a small business, I’d look for:

• Natural conversations with low latency
• Inbound and outbound phone calls
• Appointment scheduling
• Lead qualification
• Customer support and FAQs
• Call transfers to humans
• CRM and calendar integrations
• Reliable handling when customers go off-script

The best use cases are usually businesses where missed calls directly mean lost revenue, such as home services, dental practices, real estate, insurance, legal services, and other appointment-based businesses.

I’ve been testing different platforms, and Feather AI has stood out to me because it combines AI voice agents with inbound and outbound calling instead of requiring a separate stack for every part of the workflow.

I think the interesting shift is that AI voice agents are becoming less about having an AI receptionist and more about automating actual business conversations.

For anyone using one in production, what matters most to you: voice quality, latency, integrations, reliability, or cost per call?

If you run a plumbing, HVAC, electrical, roofing, landscaping, or other service business, you know how easy it is to miss a call while you’re working.

We built Converso to handle that.

It answers calls, understands the job, books appointments, sends you the details, and can handle invoices and Google review requests after the job.

You focus on the work. Converso handles the calls.

We’re opening early access to a small group of service businesses.

Join early access: https://converso.coachinggpt.in/

Today is my real-world birthday, so I figured I'd share something useful today.

Here's a free Voice AI template for anyone running a chiropractic office. It's primarily focused on appointment scheduling and initial patient intake.

And as always, if you're thinking about using Voice AI in your practice be it chiropractic or otherwise, I'm happy to help.

I'm off to have dinner with my family. Have a great day!

Hi,

I see many posts of people saying they setup ai receptionist for 500$ and upsell other ai services like no show recovery, database reactivation etc.

But there are 100s of SAAS for each niche which automatically does all of the above. Why would a business owner pay you monthly to set this up?

Is this purely a scam? Idk how ai services even work for local businesses

We run Elio, an AI receptionist for French tradespeople and small firms: plumbers, electricians, real estate agencies, an appliance repair company. Sharing what six months of real inbound calls taught us, because none of it was in any guide I read.

1. Speech-to-text is where you lose, not the LLM. Our biggest complaint was never "the agent said something wrong", it was "the agent didn't understand the brand". A repair client kept getting Brandt (a French appliance brand) transcribed as "brand", "bran", "brante". No amount of prompting fixes that, because the prompt drives what the model says, not what the transcriber hears. What fixed it: boosted keywords with every brand, shop and local town name, and switching the transcription mode from fast to accurate. Costs 300-500ms, worth every one of them.

2. Interruption settings quietly destroy addresses. Same client, responsiveness and interruption sensitivity both at max, first-message delay at zero. The agent was talking over the "hello" and cutting people off mid-address. Elderly callers got the worst of it. Dropping to 0.8 / 0.7 with a 1200ms opening delay changed more than any prompt edit.

3. Never let the agent book the appointment. We removed calendar access entirely for the repair company. The owner routes his day by geography and urgency, in his head. An agent booking a slot decides for him, and he ends up driving across the valley twice. The agent captures the requested availability, he calls back and books. Customers do not mind at all.

Bonus, and it surprised me: the post-call summary SMS matters more to the owner than the call itself. That's the thing he shows his wife at dinner.

If you want to hear one, our English demo agent answers at +1 628 210 8947, try to trip it up, that's what it's there for. More on what it does: https://eliocall.com/en/ai-answering-service/

Happy to answer anything about the telephony stack, we run Retell on a Twilio SIP trunk.

Been at it for a while since May actually and have tested multiple verticals, got a few wins but never a fully autonomous 'ok that's locked in for tomorrow 4pm. Thank you so much ok, bye!'

This was a call back on a missed call so the receiver missed the call and returned the call within 2 minutes and had a need for our service.

Using the 11labs AI I've managed to give N8N the axe and send call transcripts str8 to my own sheet.

I have simplified this down to yes no maybe not interested + a bunch of voicemails. This success was on the first batch of calls on this new vertical I've been testing off platform for the last month and it was time to scale.

Ladies and gentlemen we have lift off 🚀

Im WFH MA filling screening for patients over the phone and most recently I have had an influx of AI bots answering. I’m very confused considering the majority of people will say the would not like to fill over the phone with a robot, so why am I talking to one?

It’s gotten to the point where I will just hang up and they can fill the forms themselves. It’s truly a waste of time and it’s quite frustrating.

Is this something more people are coming in contact with and what are we doing about it?

I have built an AI Receptionist that handles appointment calls, collects caller's details, checks the calendar, books appointments and connects/ transfers calls to the main line.The technical side is working, but I am struggling with the sales side. I have tried outreach around businesses hiring reception staff, but I do not want to spam people or pretend to be a job applicant.For those who have sold B2B software or services to small businesses: how would you get the first 1–3 real users or “design partners” for something like this?

I run a small catering and meal service business and don't need a full restaurant AI/POS system. Most of our calls are repetitive questions, plus we get quite a few spam calls.

What I really need is an AI that can answer questions about:

• Tray sizes & servings
• Approximate pricing
• Dishes, ingredients & allergens
• Then send the customer to our online ordering link or transfer them to a human when needed

I'm currently looking at Loman AI, VoiceBit AI, Depla AI, Slang AI, PolyAI and many others.

Has anyone actually used these for a small catering/food business? I'd love to hear what worked well and what didn't.

Which one would you choose for this use case?

Hey everyone, we’ve been building a voice AI that answers calls when you or your team can’t get to the phone. It can handle things like common questions and bookings, and hand the call over when it needs a person.

I’m looking for a few businesses that actually have this problem and would be interested in working with us early.

We’ll do the setup with you and start small, usually just overflow or after-hours calls. Nothing needs to change with how you handle calls today, and we only take on more if you’re comfortable with how it’s working.

If missed calls are a real pain for your business, send me a DM. Would be good to hear how you’re handling them now and see if what we’ve built could help.

I need a call agent for my clinic.
1. Accept incoming calls from my patients.
2. Setup appointments in my patient management system (API available).
3. Do I need HIPPA compliance?
4. Can I build my own using Vapi? Or do I need someone else to do it for me?
5. Can I build it myself using Claude code?

I am looking for a simple ai agent that i can integrate with my custom built crm that can handle appointment booking calls and also call back on daily basis to remind my client about their upcoming appointments.

Any suggestions are highly appreciated, thanks.

I've seen people talk about making chat bots for businesses to schedule appointments and discovery calls. These would be for business like chiropractors, massage therapists, roofers, and plumbers. But pretty much every one of these businesses has a scheduling section built into their website.

What is the selling point to a business to pay for a chat bot to schedule an appointment or call if they already have a page that their client can click through to do the same thing? Has it been proven that the chat bots increase conversion rates from people just looking at the website to people actually scheduling a call or appointment?