AI Receptionists That Answer Every Call, Book the Job and Know When to Put a Person On

Generally yes, if callers know. The Telecommunications (Interception and Access) Act 1979 defines interception as listening to or recording a call without the knowledge of the person making it, and state and territory surveillance or listening device laws add their own rules. The ALRC noted that Queensland, Victoria and the Northern Territory allow a party to a conversation to record it, while NSW, South Australia, Western Australia, Tasmania and the ACT do not have that general exception. Since callers can be anywhere, we build for the strictest rule: the agent announces recording at the start, explains why, and offers a way to continue without it. Your lawyer should confirm the position for your business. This is general information, not legal advice.

Often, yes. If you are a sole trader or small team that mostly needs messages taken and simple bookings in a mainstream calendar, a subscription AI receptionist service is cheaper and faster than a custom build. A custom voice agent makes sense when calls need to read or write your own systems, follow complex booking rules, handle several locations or brands, meet specific privacy or hosting requirements, or when per seat subscription costs grow beyond what a build would cost to run.

Usually. The simplest path is to keep your number with your current provider and forward calls to the agent, either all the time, after hours, or when nobody answers within a set number of rings. You can also use a new Australian local, 1300 or 1800 number from a voice carrier. We test forwarding and failover before go live, so if the agent is ever unavailable calls fall back to a person or voicemail.

Running costs are mostly per minute: telephony, speech recognition, the language model and the synthetic voice. At the time of writing (November 2026), Retell AI lists voice agent pricing of US$0.07 to US$0.31 per minute depending on the models chosen, and Twilio lists receiving calls on an Australian local number at US$0.01 per minute plus US$3.00 a month for the number. As an illustration only, 1,000 calls a month averaging 3 minutes is 3,000 minutes, so at US$0.08 to US$0.32 per minute all in, that is roughly US$240 to US$960 a month before hosting and support. These are vendor list prices, not our prices; we model your actual call volumes before you commit.

It depends on how many call types the agent handles, how many systems it connects to, and how strict the booking and escalation rules are. Every build starts with a Discovery Audit, a fixed fee credited in full against the build. After two strategy sessions you receive a fixed price Schedule of Work with three options: The Minimum, The Recommended and The Complete. The first step is a Development Consult, a 15 minute phone call or a Zoom with Andy.

Yes, for reminders, confirmations and callbacks the customer has asked for. Outbound marketing calls are a different matter: the Do Not Call Register Act 2006 and the Telecommunications (Telemarketing and Research Calls) Industry Standard 2017 apply, and ACMA lists permitted telemarketing hours of 9am to 8pm on weekdays and 9am to 5pm on Saturdays, with no calls on Sundays or national public holidays. Follow up SMS messages that promote anything need consent, sender identification and an unsubscribe option under the Spam Act 2003. We design outbound flows to those rules and keep the evidence of consent.

For administration, yes: bookings, cancellations, reminders, directions, fees and preparation instructions. It must not give clinical advice or triage symptoms. The agent is designed to tell anyone describing an emergency to hang up and call 000, and to transfer clinical questions to staff. Health information is sensitive information under the Privacy Act, and health service providers are covered whatever their turnover, so hosting, retention and access controls are set accordingly.

They should, and our agents say so. We recommend the greeting makes clear the caller is speaking with an automated assistant for your business, alongside the recording notice. Being upfront avoids complaints, sets expectations for the conversation, and makes it natural for callers to ask for a person when they want one.

For answering calls at volume, usually yes, but it replaces part of the job, not the person. Published figures put off the shelf AI receptionists at about $150 to $400 a month, while a full time receptionist on the National Minimum Wage costs at least $58,500 a year with super. An AI agent handles routine bookings and messages at any hour; complex, sensitive or upset callers still need a person to take the transfer.

Yes, through their APIs. The agent checks availability, creates the job or booking and sends the caller and your team a confirmation, following your rules on job types, service areas and lead times. ServiceM8, simPRO, HubSpot, GoHighLevel and Google or Microsoft 365 calendars are all systems we build against. Integration takes weeks 3 to 6 of a typical eight week build, and bookings are tested with real voices before a staged go live.

It is tested for them before launch. In weeks 5 to 7 of the build we test speech recognition with real voices, including Australian accents, interruptions and background noise from a mobile in a ute. When the agent cannot understand a caller after a reasonable attempt, it offers a transfer or takes a message rather than guessing. After go live, call transcripts show where it struggles so we can tune it.