🤖 AI features
The AI Voice Receptionist, knowledge base, and transfer rules.
Everything in this section belongs to the optional AI add-on. It is not included in any core plan and it is not part of the 7-day free trial. The core phone system runs perfectly well without it.
Set it up in this order
- Knowledge base first. An AI receptionist with nothing to read will improvise, which is the failure mode you care about most.
- Decide what it must never answer. Every regulated vertical has a line (pricing, clinical, legal, warranty) and it belongs in the config before go-live.
- Transfer rules. Decide who a caller reaches when the AI hands off.
- Test call. Place one yourself before pointing a customer-facing number at it.
How the allowances work
The add-on carries its own voice minutes and message allowance, and they cap AI usage only. Ordinary texting, forwarding, menus, queues and voicemail are never limited by it. It also renews on its own date, so you can be annual on one and monthly on the other. Every AI tier has the same capabilities; only the two allowances differ.
One carrier difference: on Twilio an AI transfer can ring a whole team at once, while on Telnyx it dials one destination at a time.
Review the first week, not just the first call
One test call proves the receptionist answers. It tells you nothing about what it does with the question you did not anticipate. Every conversation leaves a transcript, and the first week of those is the most useful thing you will read, because real callers ask in ways nobody writing a knowledge base would think to.
Look for two patterns. The first is a question answered confidently and wrongly, which means the knowledge base has a gap the model filled in for itself. The second is a caller who needed a person and was never offered one, which is a transfer rule drawn too narrowly.
Answering and drafting are different jobs
Voice answering replaces a person on a live call. Message drafting writes a reply for a human to read and send. Drafting is the safer place to begin, because nothing reaches a customer without someone approving it first, and it shows you how the model handles your customers before you let it speak for you.