How to tell whether the receptionist you're talking to is AI

"Am I talking to a person or a computer?" An honest AI receptionist answers in one breath: no, it's the business's virtual receptionist, an AI. A person laughs and says yes. The tell isn't in the voice. It's in the answer.

The receptionists worth worrying about are the ones that dodge. "I'm here to help you today!" isn't an answer. Neither is "Does it matter?" If you ask twice and still don't have a yes or no, you have your answer.

Every Giday receptionist is built the same way on this, and it isn't a setting:

• The greeting says "on a recorded line" in the receptionist's own voice, before anything else. That's the first signal that you're not talking to the owner's cousin on the front desk.
• Ask whether it's a person and it tells you, immediately and cheerfully, that it's the business's virtual receptionist, an AI. It never claims to have said so earlier, and it never says "I'm a real person".
• The greeting editor refuses any wording that implies a human: "you're speaking with a real person" and "not a robot" are rejected before they're saved.
• Anyone who'd rather talk to a human is put through to the owner or leaves a priority message.

We think the honesty is the product. Callers can cope with a capable AI. What they can't cope with is being fooled, and a caller who's been told the truth in the first ten seconds trusts the booking that follows.

Voice alone won't tell you; the good ones sound Australian and unhurried. Three things often do:

1. The pause. A half-second of silence before every reply, the same length each time.
2. The too-perfect memory. It repeats your address back letter-perfect and never asks you to spell the street.
3. The refusal to go off-script. Ask about the weather. A person has an opinion.

None of those is proof. Asking is.

Australian surveillance laws are state laws and they differ, but in several states everyone on a call has to know it's being recorded, and every AI receptionist makes a record; the transcript is the product. So a receptionist that hides what it is may also be hiding that the call is kept. We publish a dated survey of what providers in this category disclose about recording, on our recording-law guide, and we update it when we check again.

Pick the honest version, for your callers and for yourself. A receptionist that says what it is costs you nothing in bookings; our own measured calls showed callers hang up on a seam between two voices, not on being told the truth. And a receptionist that pretends is a complaint waiting to happen, with your name on it. How ours greets is in how to write a phone greeting.