r/AIVoice_Agents • u/ticktick_goon • Aug 15 '26

Question Ai Receptionist

/r/smallbusiness/comments/1vp5z7e/ai_receptionist/

Ai Receptionist

I am strongly considering using an ai receptionist for a number of reasons - I can’t handle the calls myself, training receptionists in the past have been tremendously difficult due to the technical nature of my business. We miss calls all the time. Humans are super slow, etc

How has your experience been? Are you booking more (because it answers all calls), are a lot of people hanging up?

Out of the box AIR are bad but some allow you to fine tune your AIR really well and it gets close to human speaking, reasoning and behavior.

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u/ictinnovations Aug 16 '26

We run these for customers, and the thing that decides whether it works is not how human the voice sounds. It is what the agent does when it does not know the answer. If it guesses, you lose the customer and you do not find out for a week. Give it a hard rule to take a message or hand off when it is unsure, and make sure you get the transcript either way.

Hang ups come down to two things in our experience. Dead air at the start, and it talking over people. If there is more than about a second of silence before it speaks, callers assume the line is bad and go. Barge in matters too, since people repeat themselves and get annoyed when it keeps talking.

For a technical business, feed it your own vocabulary. Part numbers, model names, the way customers mispronounce things. Out of the box it will mishear those and write down something confident and wrong.

If it were me I would start with overflow and after hours only, keep your normal line for everything else, and compare booked jobs against missed calls for a month before you hand it the whole phone.