A virtual receptionist for Sydney: an AI receptionist that answers when you can't

• Answers in your business name, around the clock, on Sydney time, when you can't get to the phone.
• Books the job into your calendar mid-call and texts your customer a confirmation (Starter and up).
• Sends you the details of every call that isn't a booking, with the caller's number: emailed to you (texted too from Starter).

Hear it first: ring (02) 7501 0101 and Verity answers, or read how to hear it answer. Then try your own receptionist: the first week is free, 60 minutes of call time, starting at the first call it answers.

Sydney's service economy doesn't keep office hours. Hot-water systems die at 9pm in Penrith, apartment lockouts happen at midnight in Surry Hills, strata emergencies don't check the calendar, and the harbour city's clinics, agencies and property managers all have phones that keep ringing after the front desk goes home.

The measured reality backs it up. In the month of real calls the Giday engine answered for a Brisbane locksmith — 30 July to 22 August 2026 — 1 in 5 calls was answered outside business hours, and 1 in 10 landed on a weekend. That's the traffic most businesses hand to voicemail, and a caller who hits voicemail often just rings the next name.

Here's the honest version of what Giday does with those calls: it answers around the clock and takes the details down. From Starter, it offers the caller your next business-hours time against your real availability and, if you've chosen to have emergencies put through after hours, puts them straight through to the number you chose. On Essentials, the details come to you by email, urgent ones flagged, for you to book yourself. And unlike the traditional services, which apply after-hours surcharges they don't publish (we checked their pricing on 24 August 2026), Giday's overnight and weekend answering costs exactly nothing extra. Not as a promo — as policy: no after-hours surcharge, ever.

Plenty of Sydney businesses don't want to hand over the whole phone — they've got a receptionist, an office manager, or their own two hands most of the day. Good. Keep them. Giday works just as well as an overflow line: divert on busy or on no-answer, and it only ever answers the calls that would otherwise ring out.

That covers the lunch run, the school pickup, the 4:55pm Friday call while the office is packing up, sick days, and the fortnight your receptionist is in Bali. Your customers get answered by something that knows the business — your greeting, your services, your calendar — and instead of a voicemail backlog you get what was said, emailed to you (texted too from Starter). Start with only the calls you're already losing: if that's all Giday ever does for you, the Starter plan at $49 a month is built for exactly that job.

Sydney is well served by traditional answering services, and at trade volumes they're not cheap. Their published rates (checked 24 August 2026) run a monthly fee of $25–$49 + GST, plus $2.60–$4.00 per answered call for message-taking, with diary booking sold as a separate product metered at roughly $2.99 per minute, setup fees of $0–$99, and after-hours surcharges whose amounts aren't published at all.

On a month of steady trade calls, that runs into the hundreds of dollars for messages alone, before a single job is booked.

Giday's price list tops out at $299. Five monthly plans — $19, $49, $99, $149 and $299 a month, AUD with GST included — booking included from Starter up, published minute allowances, and one published overage rate (50c a minute on every plan). Run over, and the phone keeps answering at 50c a minute past your allowance; if a bigger plan would have cost less for the month, we email you the figures. The full table is on the pricing page, and the wider comparison on the phone answering service page.

The kinds of calls Giday is built to catch look a lot like a Sydney trading day. Booking, texts and putting calls through are on Starter and up:

• The emergency plumber in the Inner West. Burst-pipe calls answered while you're mid-job; genuine emergencies put through to the number you chose if you've switched that on (Starter and up), the rest booked in for business hours against your real availability.
• The locksmith covering the CBD and the east. The midnight lockout gets a calm answer, and is put through to the number you chose when it's a genuine emergency and you've switched that on for after hours; everything else gets your next available slot offered and the details texted to you.
• The strata and property managers. An after-hours maintenance line that actually answers — every request logged, relayed by text from Starter, with full transcripts to read from Steady.
• The sparkie in the Hills or on the Northern Beaches. Quotes from your own price list on the Busy plan and up — one honest number, the way you'd say it.
• The clinic or studio. Appointments booked into your calendar with SMS confirmations, and evening callers offered your next available times. A health practice runs in restricted mode: no clinical details are discussed or written down, and no audio or transcript is kept.

If your work is on the tools, the Giday for tradies page covers the trade call flows properly.

Giday's working month is public: answering for a Brisbane locksmith since late July 2026 — jobs booked mid-call at typically 2.5 minutes from hello to booked (measured, 30 July – 22 August 2026), priced quotes given over the phone from the approved price list, messages relayed by text, 1 in 5 calls arriving outside business hours, and call volume on that one line up 24% across the window. The full breakdown is on the Brisbane page.

Just as important is what we won't tell you. We don't claim Giday makes a human unnecessary — some calls should be put through to you, and they are. We don't claim anyone turns up at 3am — after hours it answers, takes the details and, from Starter, books the caller into your next real available slot and, if you've switched it on, puts genuine emergencies through to the number you chose. And it never pretends to be a person — ask and it tells you straight away it's a virtual receptionist, not a person. In a market full of big claims, we'd rather show you a measured window and a published price list.

Elsewhere in the country there are pages for Brisbane, Melbourne, Canberra, Adelaide, Perth, Darwin and Hobart, and the full story starts at the virtual receptionist rundown.