Smith.ai

Smith.ai is the established name in this job, and its AI receptionist is best understood as an AI front desk with an escape hatch. The AI answers first, around the clock, qualifies the caller against your criteria, books consultations and appointments, routes calls, and writes the outcome, recording and summary into the systems you already use. When a conversation gets complex, sensitive or valuable, it can hand over to the company's large team of live, North America based receptionists rather than leaving the caller stuck with a bot. That hybrid safety net, plus a testing studio where you can rehearse the agent before it meets real callers, is why law firms and other intake-heavy practices lean towards it. You pay per call, which suits long intake conversations, and there is a genuinely useful free tier to test it against real callers before spending anything. For a solo founder the downsides are cost and fine print. Paid AI plans start well above the budget rivals, custom prompting and custom integrations sit on the enterprise tier, cancellation needs thirty days notice, and the company states it is not HIPAA compliant, which rules it out for regulated healthcare conversations. It is also easy to confuse its AI pricing with its much more expensive human receptionist pricing, so check which product a quote is for. If your calls are valuable, complicated and worth qualifying properly, the premium can be rational. If you mainly need messages taken cheaply, it is more than you need.

Billed per call for the AI Receptionist. Free covers 25 calls a month, Pro is priced by included call volume at about $2.00 per call, and Enterprise lowers the per-call rate with full-service setup.