What is AI Receptionist?

An AI receptionist is software that answers a business's phone calls with a conversational voice AI, handling the front-desk tasks a human receptionist would.

An AI receptionist picks up incoming calls, greets callers with the business name, answers common questions from a knowledge base the business provides, books or reschedules appointments in a connected calendar, takes messages and transfers urgent or high-value calls to a person. Each call usually produces a transcript and a short summary.

Compared with voicemail it captures callers who would otherwise hang up; compared with a traditional answering service it can complete tasks (booking, qualifying, updating a CRM) rather than only taking messages, and it can answer many calls at once, 24 hours a day.

Typical users are clinics, dental practices, law firms, home-service companies, salons, restaurants and property managers — any business where a missed call is a missed customer.