Is an AI receptionist legal in Australia?

An AI receptionist works by listening to your caller, understanding them, and writing down what happened — the transcript that lands in your dashboard is the product. (The exception on Giday is restricted mode for health practices: the call is understood live, but no audio and no transcript are kept. The greeting still says the line is recorded.) Australian surveillance laws generally cover any record or report of a private conversation, not just the audio - so the safest reading, and the one we run on, is that a transcript counts the same as a recording. We wouldn't lean on a "we only transcribe" loophole, and we don't.

That's true for every provider in this category, whether their website mentions it or not. So the question isn't whether your AI receptionist records — it's whether the recording is being done lawfully on your phone line, in your business's name.

Recording a private phone conversation is governed by state and territory surveillance laws, and they don't agree with each other:

Three things make this sharper than it first looks. First, phone calls cross borders: a business in single-party Queensland routinely takes calls from people in all-party NSW, so the practical standard for any Australian business is the strictest state's. Second, the penalties are criminal in several states — fines, and in some, imprisonment — not a slap on the wrist from a regulator. Third, there's a federal layer: businesses covered by the Privacy Act — turnover above $3 million, or any health service provider regardless of size — have separate notification obligations under the Australian Privacy Principles when they collect voice recordings and transcripts. A call travelling over a phone network is also covered by the federal Telecommunications (Interception and Access) Act 1979, which makes it an offence to intercept a call without the knowledge of the person making it; the notice in the greeting is how every caller knows.

The standard way businesses handle all-party consent on an inbound line is the one you've heard a thousand times: a short recorded notice before anyone answers — "Your call may be recorded for quality and training purposes… connecting you now." A caller who stays on the line after the notice is generally taken to have consented. Every bank, airline and telco in the country runs on this.

The objection we hear is that a notice will scare callers off. We've measured the opposite — with one important catch. On the live line behind our virtual receptionist, the notice was first played the industry way — a carrier-style system voice, before the receptionist spoke. Callers hung up at zero seconds of conversation, right at the seam where the second voice started. The notice was not the problem; the hand-off was. So the notice moved inside the receptionist's own greeting, in their own voice, with no gap and no second voice: "Giday, you've reached Smith Plumbing — Dave speaking, on a recorded line. How can I help you?" The lesson isn't "skip the notice." It's that a caller will happily sit through a notice, and will not sit through being handed between two voices.

We built the compliant version in as the standard, because the careful option costs nothing when it's done right:

• A recording notice is in the greeting on every call, on every line — your receptionist's own voice says on a recorded line in the greeting's first sentence, with no separate announcement in front of it. Not an upsell, not a setting you have to find: it is simply how the line works, and it cannot be switched off.
• Ask your receptionist whether it's a person and it tells you straight away it's a virtual receptionist, not a person, every time. No pretending, no "most callers can't tell" games.
• Asked "are you recording this?", it answers honestly. Yes — and if the caller isn't comfortable, it offers to have every record of that call deleted, and honours it: the recording and transcript are purged within the hour of the call ending.
• One voice, no hand-off. The notice is part of your receptionist's own greeting, not a separate announcement played in front of it. That is why it doesn't cost you callers: what loses them is being passed between two voices, not being told the line is recorded.
• There is no off switch, and that is deliberate. We used to offer one behind a plain-English warning. We withdrew it on 26 August 2026 and deleted the code, because in New South Wales, South Australia, Western Australia, Tasmania and the ACT the notice is how consent to record is obtained — so a line without it leaves neither you nor us with a consent position. A control we would talk you out of using is not a feature.

On 25 August 2026 we reviewed the public websites of eight AI receptionist and AI phone-answering providers serving Australian small businesses — marketing pages, FAQs, pricing, blogs, terms and privacy policies, with full sitemap crawls where a claim of absence needed checking twice. "Not found" means exactly that: we looked hard and it isn't published; it doesn't mean the capability can't exist. If we've missed something, tell us — we'll correct the table with a dated note.

About our own row: a Giday receptionist does not announce that it is an AI unprompted — it confirms it, immediately and every time, when a caller asks, and it never claims to be a person. What every caller is told without being asked is that the line is recorded, which is the column to its left. No other provider's cell has been changed — every one of them is still the finding from the 25 August 2026 review, in the words it was recorded in.

Credit where it's due: Waboom AI and VoxReach publish genuinely serious compliance material, and the category is better for it. The pattern that should worry you is the other one — products marketed as recording and transcribing every call automatically, on sites that say nothing anywhere about a caller ever being told. The two facts that combination creates on your phone line are exactly the two facts Australia's surveillance laws care about.

Whoever you're considering — including us — ask these, and get the answers in writing:

1. Does a recording notice play by default on my line? In the very first thing the caller hears, before anything is recorded — not buried in an options menu.
2. Will the agent tell my callers it's AI the moment they ask, and never claim to be a person? "Most callers can't tell" is a sales line, not a disclosure policy.
3. If a caller asks "are you recording this?", what exactly does the agent say? Ask for the actual behaviour, not a reassurance.
4. Can a caller have their records deleted, and who actions it? A right that no one can exercise isn't a right.
5. Can the notice be switched off at all, and who can do it? If it can be — by you, or by them on request — the risk is sitting quietly with you. Ours cannot.

Giday's answers are on this page. Compare freely — that's what the page is for. When you're ready, pricing is here, month to month, and the comparison with human services covers the rest.