How to choose an AI receptionist
Ten questions — most answerable in thirty minutes on a demo line — that separate the products that work from the ones that only demo well.
The ten questions
This checklist is a condensed, do-it-yourself version of the rubric we use in formal testing. Thirty minutes with a vendor’s demo line answers most of it.
- Call the demo line yourself — twice. Once as an easy caller, once as a hard one: interrupt it, mumble, change your mind mid-sentence. The gap between those two calls is the product.
- Ask it to reschedule something. Booking is the rehearsed path. Rescheduling and cancelling exercise lookup, verification and change — where weak products fall apart.
- Describe an emergency. Say the words a panicked caller would say. Anything other than immediate escalation is disqualifying for medical, dental and home services.
- Count the silence. Time the pause before each answer. Three seconds feels broken on a phone; ask the vendor what their real-world latency is and how they measure it.
- Make it take a message. Then check the message it delivers against what you said. Transcription that mangles names and numbers creates work instead of saving it.
- Ask what it does when it doesn’t know. The right answer involves a graceful handoff to a human. The wrong answer is confident improvisation.
- Demand a scheduling round-trip in YOUR system. An integration listed on a website is not an integration working in your practice-management or dispatch software. Watch a live round-trip before signing.
- Ask how updates are tested. Models and prompts change weekly. Who verifies that this week’s update didn’t break rescheduling? (This is exactly why continuous testing exists.)
- Get the failure numbers. Ask: of your last thousand calls, how many ended with the caller hanging up unserved? A vendor that can’t answer isn’t measuring.
- Read an independent report card. Sales demos are the vendor’s best five minutes. A report card is a run of controlled calls scored against one rubric, with the number of calls printed beside the letter and the evidence published.
Common questions
AI receptionist vs. answering service — which do I need?
A human answering service scales poorly and costs per minute; an AI receptionist scales infinitely but varies wildly in quality. The checklist above works on both — the grade that matters is how they handle YOUR calls.
How much should an AI receptionist cost?
Typical pricing runs from modest flat monthly fees to per-minute rates. Price predicts quality poorly in our testing — grade first, then compare price among vendors that pass.
The independent guide to AI receptionists. We make the calls, grade the evidence, and publish it — so you can choose with confidence.