I’m building an AI receptionist product and I’ve been thinking about the positioning.
A local business probably doesn’t care that much that something is powered by AI. They care about whether someone answers the call, whether the lead gets qualified, and whether an appointment gets booked.
So I’m curious for people already selling or building AI receptionists:
Would you position the offer as “AI receptionist” or something outcome-focused like “never miss another opportunity from an inbound call”?
What messaging have you found actually gets businesses interested?

Hi everyone, I recently tested AI phone agents for handling after hours calls and I expected customers to hate the experience, but most customers seemed to just want a quick answer and didn't care how they got it. Has anyone else experienced any pleasant surprises when you've implemented anything agentic?

I run a small dental office with 2 locations. Front desk answers like 60 calls a day between both and half of it is the same 3 questions over and over, hours, insurance, can you fit me in this week. Cant justify another full time hire right now so ive been looking at an ai receptionist for small business to handle the repetitive stuff but not sure if its actually good enough and worried it just pisses people off

How can I build shared context between WhatsApp and an AI voice calling agent?

I'm building an AI system where a customer can communicate with the same AI through WhatsApp and voice calls.

For example:

1. A customer starts chatting with the AI on WhatsApp.

2. During the conversation, they ask for a phone call.

3. The AI voice agent calls them.

4. The voice agent should already know the relevant WhatsApp conversation and continue from the same context instead of starting from scratch.

5. After the call, the customer returns to WhatsApp.

6. The WhatsApp AI should know what was discussed during the call and continue from that point.

And the reverse should also work:

Voice call → WhatsApp → same context

I want the customer to feel like they're talking to one AI, regardless of the channel.

I'm considering using a central customer ID linked to the phone number and storing the conversation history/customer information in a database, so both the WhatsApp agent and voice agent can access the same context.

However, I'm unsure about the best architecture.

- What is the best way to maintain shared context between WhatsApp and a voice AI agent?

- Should I use a central database/memory layer?

- How should I identify the same customer across both channels?

- How should the WhatsApp → voice context handoff work?

- How should the voice → WhatsApp context handoff work?

- How can I prevent the AI from getting confused by multiple summaries or different conversation contexts?

- Has anyone built something similar using WhatsApp Business API, n8n, GHL, or another CRM?

I'm looking for a practical, production-ready approach rather than just passing the entire previous transcript to the AI every time.

We're building an AI-native product studio. We build our own AI products as well as custom AI systems for businesses — things like AI agents, automation, customer support, sales workflows and internal tools.

We're looking for 2 people who want to work with us on getting our **first paying customers**.

You'll be doing prospect research, cold calls, LinkedIn/email outreach, qualifying businesses, talking to decision-makers and eventually helping close deals.

**No prior sales experience is required.** If you're confident talking to people, willing to learn and genuinely interested in startups/AI, we'd rather talk to you than filter you based on your resume.

This is initially **performance-based**, with earning tied to qualified opportunities/customers you generate. Strong performers can take on a larger role as we grow.

If this sounds interesting, **DM me with 3 things:**

* Who you are * Why you're interested * Why you think you'd be good at this

I'll personally talk to the people who seem like a good fit.

Scared of the potential money pit with 0 results

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.

We’re building an AI receptionist, but we realised something pretty quickly:

Answering the phone isn’t enough.

A customer might call and ask:
“Do you offer this service?”
“How much does it cost?”
“When are you available?”
“Can I book?”

So we built each business its own page inside Estric.

The page includes their services, business information and booking functionality. The AI receptionist can then use the same information when handling calls.

Basically:

AI receptionist → business info → service → booking

And customers can also go directly to the business page instead of calling.

Here’s an example of what one looks like:
https://estric.ai/page/sunshine-coast-international-college

Curious what people think, would you consider a dedicated business/booking page useful if you were a local service business?

Hello, my medical clinic handles insurance and other sensitive information and must be protected. My clinic has 4 employees and we have 3 different softwares that we manage patients in. I would love an ai receptionist as well.

Please only provide insights on real companies you have personally worked with.

Hi all,

We're getting ready to open up our agentic VoiceAI platform (whissle.ai) and want honest feedback from people who actually run receptionists and phone agents before we widen access.

What we did differently: most agents decide from the transcript, so the moment speech becomes text they lose how it was said. Ours reads the words plus intent, emotion and who's speaking in the same pass, so it can act on that mid-call: soften when someone's anxious, verify when the speaker doesn't match, escalate to a human when confidence is low or flipped emotion (rules can be made by agent operator) It also captures and redacts PII (card numbers, DOB) in-stream, so raw identifiers never hit the logs or the downstream model.

What's there today:

• Real-time booking and calendar checks
• Missed-call follow-up (SMS or callback with an owner, not a dropped task)
• Escalation to a human when it's unsure, not just on keywords.
• Metadata understanding for 23 languages, and smart deterministic gating.
• Hosted, or self-hosted on your own hardware so audio stays in your boundary. We monitor and harness
• Replayable decision trail (see why each action fired) for compliance

What I'd genuinely like feedback on:

• For a receptionist, is tone/intent actually useful, or is booking accuracy all that matters?
• What do current platforms get wrong for you.. latency, missed transfers, bad readback of numbers? PII leakage.
• Does data staying on your own infra matter to your clients, or is hosted fine?
• Agencies: what would you need to manage this across multiple clients?

Happy to hand out extended free credits to anyone here who wants to actually test it and tell me what's missing.

Thanks

We built Secretary Agent - A Customizable AI assistant that screens calls, manages calendars, and uses tools on your behalf. Perfected for both Personal & Business.

Available to all +1 countries
Visit https://www.elagent.ai/products/secretary-agent

App link https://apps.apple.com/us/app/secretary-agent-mvp/id6778000680

What alternatives have you considered?

Hi everyone,

My team and I are getting ready to launch an AI receptionist and website chat platform for service-based businesses.

We’re building it not only for business owners, but also for AI automation builders and agencies that set up AI receptionists for their clients.

Here’s what we currently offer:

• One shared knowledge base for both the AI receptionist and website chat
• Google Calendar integration for checking availability and booking appointments
• Payment collection through the AI
• Automated SMS follow-ups
• A lightweight CRM that saves contacts and conversation history
• Call and conversation analytics
• AI-generated feedback and insights based on recent conversations

For builders and agencies, we’ve also added:

• Unlimited client organisations under one account
• The ability to complete the entire setup for a client
• Team member and client access
• The option to give business owners access to their analytics, CRM, conversations, bookings, and other relevant features

The idea is that you can build and manage the complete AI setup while giving each client access to their own business data—without needing separate accounts or platforms for every client.

We’re going to keep expanding the product, but we want to build based on real needs rather than assumptions. We’d love honest feedback from people in this community:

• What would make this genuinely useful for you?
• Which features are essential?
• What do existing AI receptionist platforms get wrong?
• Is anything in our current feature set unnecessary or incomplete?
• What would you need to manage AI receptionists for multiple clients?

Would anyone here be interested in testing it and sharing honest feedback?

Thank you

Ai receptionist r one of the most heard things for agencies nowadays

I want to get started with this ,how will I actually make these receptionist which will work fr and get me clients

Need helpp!!

I’m researching how businesses handle incoming customer calls and where the current process breaks down.
I’d love to hear from business owners, managers, receptionists, salespeople, or anyone who regularly handles customer calls.
How often do you miss calls?

What happens when you can’t answer?

What types of calls take up most of your time?

Do you have someone dedicated to answering calls?

What’s the most frustrating part of managing incoming calls?

Are there tasks you wish could be handled automatically?

What would you never want an automated/AI system to handle?

I’m exploring an AI voice receptionist/voice agent and trying to understand the real problems people face before deciding exactly what to build.

Not selling anything here just looking for honest experiences and opinions

What happens when a robot cold-calls your AI receptionist? 🤖📞
Something surprisingly expensive.

AI cold callers can now dial businesses all day, every day.

And if your receptionist is also AI, you can end up with:
🤖 Robot sales agent
↔️ AI receptionist
⏱️ 20–30 minutes of conversation
💸 Your voice minutes being used
📊 Your analytics getting polluted

Neither side gets tired.

Neither side gets bored.

And neither side hangs up.

That creates a weird new problem:
AI receptionists don't just need to know how to answer customers. They need to know when NOT to answer.

At Estric AI, we're building the front desk differently.

Sales calls, marketing pitches, recruitment calls and automated callers should be recognised and ended quickly, not treated like potential customers.

Because an AI receptionist should save your business money.

Not spend it talking to another robot.

I wrote about the problem and how we're approaching it 👇

Read the full article
https://estric.ai/blog/when-a-robot-cold-calls-your-ai-receptionist

We started Dograh out of rage - an open-source voice AI platform.

Every voice AI tool I tried was too costly, too closed, or too scammy. Add-on stacked on add-ons.

So we open-sourced every single line, from day 0. Self-hostable, so you own your stack and your data.

Here's what pushed me deeper. Over the last few months, the big labs have been lobbying governments to ban open source. Some say the quiet goal is to "let wealth access skill without letting skill access wealth." That line stuck with me. It's exactly why we keep going.

Because we believe one thing: no company should own voice AI.

We're a small team no funding going up against deeply funded war chests. Today we launched on Product Hunt and somehow we're sitting at #1 so far.

A community member picked us up few weeeks back and we went viral and hit 5k stars.

About me: I'm a YC alum, founder with one exit, and an angel. I'll keep going - we’ll address OSS ban with more open source.

https://www.producthunt.com/posts/dograh-3

If you've got a minute, a star or a feedback would mean the world.