Does an AI receptionist get your details right? Here is our fix

Does an AI receptionist hear your phone number correctly?

Not always, and no AI solves that completely. Speech recognition trips over long strings of digits, especially when you talk fast or call from the road. So our AI receptionist reads your number back out loud once at most. If it is wrong, it asks you to key the phone number in instead, ending with the hash key.

That limit went in on 10 September, and it was overdue. In one call the day before, 86 of the 207 seconds went into reading the same number back over and over. The caller corrected one digit, the agent read out the whole number again, the caller corrected it again, and round they went while the clock ran.

The loop is gone now. After one read-back it switches to keying in, and then these are no longer heard digits but key presses arriving directly. Mishearing is off the table. If you want to hear it for yourself, call the agent on +31 598 79 90 09: it answers 24/7 and it is the same agent we put in for clients.

Why does it not ask for your name and email on the phone?

Because spelling things out is the slowest and most error-prone part of any phone call. Your name, your email address, your company name and your town are things our AI receptionist never asks for. The moment you pick a slot, you get a text with a link where you fill those in yourself, no speech recognition in between.

It is faster, and privacy law asks for it too. The GDPR says in article 5(1)(c) that personal data shall be "adequate, relevant and limited to what is necessary in relation to the purposes for which they are processed". Details that come out of speech recognition are a guess; details you type yourself are not. See the text of article 5.

The text is a single message of 160 characters at most, so it never arrives in pieces: "fill in your name and email here and your appointment is confirmed", with the link behind it. Two fields, nothing more.

Is the appointment really in the calendar before you hang up?

Yes. The agent reads out the free slots from the calendar, you pick one, and it books it while you are still on the line. Then you get a second text with the day and the time in it. Booking an appointment costs you no callback round and no form afterwards.

That confirmation by text has been in place since 9 September. Before that, the agent closed the call saying a confirmation was on its way, while the only message going out was the form link: no day, no time. A client spotted it after the very first real call to the number, and now the promise holds: "your free scan is booked: Thursday at ten. We will call you."

That is the difference with an answering service. One takes a message and hands the ball back to you; this one actually puts the appointment in the diary. The same agent does this on your website and on WhatsApp too, with the same calendar behind it.

Will an AI receptionist invent a price when it is unsure?

Ours will not, and that is deliberate. Amounts come only from the live price list, never from its own memory and never from its knowledge base. Ask about one service and it names that price. Ask about five at once and it names one, then books the free scan for the rest.

If it genuinely does not know something, it says so and makes sure you get a call back. Why we would rather have it say "I don't know" than produce a plausible sounding answer is set out in what an AI agent does when it does not know. An agent that guesses at a price or a lead time costs you a customer, not just a call.

Every change gets called ten times first

Before we change anything about the agent, we make it run ten fixed calls: a price question, booking an appointment, a misheard number, a caller who changes their mind halfway. Only once it gets through those does the change go live on the real number.

At the last switch the new setup passed eight of the ten scenarios, against five to six for the one before it. You notice that mostly in the pauses: the gap between your question and its answer got shorter, and it still keeps to two sentences per turn and one question at a time.

What does an AI receptionist that does all this cost?

The Phone Agent costs €595 setup and €349 per month, including 150 calls, then €0.95 per call. A call counts up to 5 minutes. Want the same agent on your website and WhatsApp as well, that is the AI receptionist: €795 setup and €495 per month, with 150 calls and 1,000 chat conversations included. It is all rental, cancellable monthly.

If your line is busy there is the AI receptionist Plus at €1,295 setup and €795 per month, with 400 calls, 3,000 chat conversations and three connections to your own systems included. What your own combination costs is worked out with the calculator on the pricing page. The full role is on the AI receptionist page, and how our rates compare with the rest of the market is in what an AI receptionist costs in 2026.

Prices updated: September 2026, excluding VAT.

Just try it yourself. Call +31 598 79 90 09, name a day that suits you and key in your number. You will have an appointment booked within two minutes, and then you know exactly what your own callers will hear.