AI receptionist
AI Receptionist for Calls, Bookings, Questions & Human Handoff
A multilingual AI receptionist that answers your number, books into your real calendar, answers from your own documents and hands the call to your team when a person is needed. It runs inside a full contact center, with queues, staff, booking, CRM and WhatsApp and SMS already behind it.
Quick answer
What is the DialerBee AI receptionist? It is DialerBee's AI voice agent, Layla, answering an inbound number routed to it from your DID inventory. It answers questions from a knowledge base you upload, speaks only prices from your service catalogue, and books, reschedules or cancels appointments after a free-busy check on a Google Calendar or Microsoft 365 calendar. It hands the call to a person when one is needed and follows up by SMS or WhatsApp. It speaks Arabic dialects, including Gulf, Levantine and Egyptian, plus 10 more languages, with a female voice (Layla). You configure it in Agent Studio, with kill switches you control, and it is billed by usage on the Professional and Enterprise plans.
Why the platform matters
A receptionist needs somewhere to send the call
Many AI answering services sit in front of your phone line and take messages. That solves the ringing phone, but it leaves your team with a list to work through, a calendar the bot never touched and callers who still have not had an answer.
A real front desk knows the diary, the prices and who on the team handles what. DialerBee's AI receptionist runs on the same platform as your inbound queues, agent desktop, appointments portal and messaging, so a call the agent cannot finish has somewhere to go, and a call it does finish lands in the same customer history as your human calls.
What it handles
The calls your front desk takes every day
Answering the number
An inbound number in your DID inventory is routed to the AI voice agent the same way it would be routed to a queue, a person or an IVR flow. The caller is greeted by the persona you set, not by a menu.
Bookings and changes
The agent checks free-busy on the connected calendar, then books, reschedules or cancels during the call. It does not take a message and promise someone will sort it out later.
Questions about your business
Opening hours, services, policies, directions, what to bring. Answers come from documents you upload to the knowledge base, retrieved by semantic search.
Prices you actually charge
Only prices in your service catalogue can be spoken. If a price is not in the catalogue, the agent does not invent one.
The follow-up message
A confirmation or follow-up goes out by SMS or WhatsApp after the call, in a voice matched to the one the caller heard.
Getting the caller to a person
When the call needs a human, the agent hands off to one. That is a designed branch of the conversation, not a failure state.
What it deliberately hands to people
Some calls should never stay with a machine
An AI receptionist is useful because it knows its limits. Decide before launch which calls go straight to a person, and design the handoff as part of the conversation rather than a fallback at the end of a loop. The agent supports staff; it does not stand in for them on the calls that need judgement or care.
- A complaint, or a caller who is angry or upset
- A payment dispute or an unusual request
- Anything that sounds like an emergency
- Medical, legal or financial advice of any kind
- Emotionally sensitive calls: bereavement, bad news, a frightened caller
- Any caller who asks for a person, and certainly any caller who asks twice
What it says has to be true
Your diary, your documents, your prices
Booking and calendar
Before offering a time, the agent checks free-busy on the connected calendar. Google Calendar and Microsoft 365 sync at organisation scope and to each staff member's own calendar, with change notifications coming back. The service catalogue carries each service's duration and resources, and capacity rules refuse a booking when a service is full instead of double-booking it.
The agent only tells the caller a booking is made, moved or cancelled once the system has confirmed it.
Answers from your knowledge base
Upload your documents and the agent answers from them by semantic search, so a caller who phrases a question differently from your policy document still gets the right passage. Change the document and you have changed what the agent knows, without rewriting a script.
The price-truth guard
A wrong price is the one mistake a customer will hold you to. The price-truth guard means only prices in your catalogue can be spoken, and every candidate sentence passes guardrails before it is turned into speech.
More detail on the booking side: appointments and reminders and appointment-based businesses.
Before, during and after the call
The parts an answering app leaves to you
Customer history and CRM
Every AI call leaves a result: the recording, the transcript and the outcome, pushed into your CRM. When your team picks up the customer later, the AI call sits in the same history as the human ones, visible in the agent desktop's Customer 360 panel.
SMS and WhatsApp follow-up and reminders
After the call, the agent can send a follow-up on SMS or WhatsApp. Appointment reminders go out over SMS, WhatsApp and email on the policy you set, with ICS attachments, and a messages-sent report shows what actually left. See WhatsApp and SMS.
After hours
Business-hours and holiday calendars are set per tenant and enforced by schedule gates, so a public holiday needs nobody to remember it. When you are closed, callers to a queue hear a text-to-speech message in the voice you chose, and an SMS fallback template can go out so they know they were heard.
Missed calls
When a queue does not answer within your ring timeout, from 5 seconds to 5 minutes and 45 seconds by default, the caller hears your own announcement and a nominated manager gets an SMS from your own sender ID naming the caller. See missed-call recovery and our guide for Gulf businesses.
Multilingual and Arabic
An AI receptionist that answers in the caller's own Arabic
Arabic is handled as dialects rather than as one flattened language, including Gulf, Levantine and Egyptian, so a caller in Dubai and a caller in Amman both hear something that sounds local. The agent works in 10 more languages besides, 11 in total, which matters in cities where the person booking is rarely speaking their receptionist's native language.
Layla, the female voice, speaks for each persona. Callers can interrupt and the agent stops and listens. Before going live, place a test call from Agent Studio and listen in the dialect your customers actually speak.
Human handoff and queues
When the agent hands over, a real contact center is waiting
The handoff is only as good as what is on the other side of it. In DialerBee, your staff work in inbound queues that route by FIFO, round-robin or longest-idle, each with its own priority, maximum wait and wrap-up time, and callers can hear their position and estimated wait instead of waiting blind.
Supervisors see queue depth live on the wallboard and can listen to a call, whisper to the agent or barge in.
You stay in control
- Persona, voice, knowledge base and flow profile configured in Agent Studio
- Versions with publish and rollback, so a bad change can be undone
- Number exceptions and capacity limits set before a call is placed
- Kill switches to stop one agent, one campaign or all AI calling
- AI features switched on only by explicit tenant configuration
More on the agent itself: AI voice agent.
A simple framework
Should this call be AI or human?
Sort your call types into three groups before you route a single number. The human group may be the smallest, but it is the one that decides whether customers trust the rest.
Structured, repeatable calls where the right answer already exists in your diary or your documents.
- Booking, rescheduling and cancelling appointments
- Status and opening-hours questions
- Frequently asked questions answered from your knowledge base
- Reminders and confirmations
- Passing a caller to a person when they ask for one
Calls that begin routinely but can turn, where the agent handles the routine part and a person takes over.
- Complaints, where the caller should reach a person quickly
- Complex cases that span several services or bookings
- Requests that need judgement or an exception to policy
- Callers unsure what they need
Calls where the cost of a wrong or cold answer is too high for any automated system.
- Emergencies, which should go straight to a person or the emergency services
- Medical or legal advice
- Emotionally sensitive conversations
- Anything your own policy says a person must handle
This framework is general guidance, not medical, legal or regulatory advice. Your own policies and any rules that apply to your sector decide which calls a person must handle.
General comparison
AI receptionist vs human receptionist vs hybrid
| Human receptionist only | AI receptionist only | Hybrid, AI plus staff | |
|---|---|---|---|
| Answering when the team is busy | Calls wait or ring out while the receptionist is with someone | The agent answers a number routed to it, within the limits you set | The agent takes routine calls; your team takes the rest |
| Bookings | Accurate, but only one call at a time | Books, reschedules and cancels after a free-busy check | Routine bookings by the agent, exceptions by staff |
| Prices and policies | Depends on what the person remembers | Only catalogue prices; answers from your documents | Same guardrails, with a person for anything off-script |
| Complaints and sensitive calls | Handled with empathy and judgement | Should not be left to the agent | Handed to a person by design |
| Languages | Whatever your staff speak | Arabic dialects plus 10 more languages | Agent covers languages your staff do not |
| After the call | Notes, if somebody writes them | Recording, transcript and outcome pushed to the CRM | One customer history across AI and human calls |
A qualitative comparison of operating models. The AI column describes the DialerBee AI voice agent; outcomes depend on your configuration, call mix and staffing.
Privacy and security
A receptionist hears names, phone numbers and appointment details all day. Each tenant's data is isolated with PostgreSQL row-level security, data is encrypted in transit with TLS 1.2+ and at rest with AES-256, and recordings are served through signed links that expire. Retention periods are configurable per tenant, and customer call data is not used to train shared cross-tenant models by default.
These are compliance-supporting controls; DialerBee does not provide legal advice or guarantee regulatory compliance. Read the details on the trust center and in the AI data policy.
Buyer checklist
How to evaluate any AI receptionist
Six checks worth running with any vendor, including us.
Listen to a test call in your callers' language
A transcript is not enough. Place a test call in your customers' dialect and listen to how it sounds, handles an interruption and ends.
Ask what happens when it does not know
Find out where the answers come from and what stops a made-up price.
Book something real
Make, move and cancel a booking against a real calendar, then check the diary.
Try to reach a person
Ask for a human, then ask again, and confirm the handoff fits how your team works.
Check who can switch it off
Your supervisor should be able to stop one agent, one campaign or all AI calling from the console, without raising a ticket.
Read the data terms
Where recordings are stored, how long they are kept, and whether your calls train anyone else's models. These belong in writing before launch.
Pricing: the AI voice agent is a usage-billed add-on on Professional and Enterprise, metered by minutes. See pricing.
Questions
AI receptionist FAQ
What is an AI receptionist?
Can the AI receptionist book appointments?
Does it speak Arabic?
Will it replace my receptionist?
What happens to calls when we are closed or nobody answers?
How is the AI receptionist priced?
Hear the AI receptionist on a demo tenant
We will show you a booking made on a call, a question answered from a knowledge base, and a handoff to a person, in English or Arabic.
Not sure yet? Take the AI receptionist readiness assessment or estimate the value with the AI receptionist ROI calculator.
Explore further
AI voice agent
Everything Layla can do, inbound and outbound.
Missed-call recovery
What callers hear, and who is told, when nobody answers.
Appointments and reminders
The portal, the service catalogue and the reminder policy.
Appointment-based businesses
The whole booking workflow, assembled for diary-driven teams.
Salons and spas
Bookings taken while the team is with a client.
Healthcare outreach
Reminders and patient follow-up with consent controls.
Missed calls in the Gulf
A practical guide to recovering missed calls.
Trust and security
Tenant isolation, encryption and AI data practices.