Answer Every Call: Building an AI Phone Receptionist

A voice agent that answers, captures the enquiry and texts back.

A complete build guide for an AI phone receptionist, written from a system in daily use with small businesses. Covers designing the call flow, writing prompts that hold up against real callers, connecting the voice layer to a phone number, capturing and routing the enquiry, sending the follow-up text, handing over to a human, and what it costs to run per call. The last third is about failure: what breaks, how to hear about it before your customer does, and how to test against messy calls rather than tidy ones.

• Full call flow design, from greeting to qualified enquiry to text follow-up
• Prompt patterns that survive interruptions, accents, background noise and rambling callers
• Handover rules: when the agent should stop talking and fetch a human
• Failure handling, monitoring and per-call cost, so it doesn't break silently