The receptionist that hangs up on robocalls

Why I wanted it

A one-person business cannot afford to miss a real call, and cannot afford to spend the day answering robocalls. I wanted something between the two: a voice that greets people warmly, knows what my company does, answers the easy questions, and gets the real ones to me.

It is also the most direct demonstration I can offer. You can phone the demo.

What happened

I built it three times in three months, which is roughly how I learn anything.

The first version ran on a state machine and one cloud provider. The second was rewritten in a different framework a month later. The third, in April, got a memory: it answers questions from the same knowledge base as my website, so if the website knows it, the phone knows it.

The part I like most is what happens when a real inquiry comes in. I get a text with a summary. I reply Y to be dropped into the live call, or N for a callback. The caller never sees my personal number; everything goes through the business line.

The spam exit line is polite: “I don’t think we’re the right fit for what you’re looking for. Take care.”

There is a rule at the top of that project’s notes that came from pain: treat assumptions as questions, not facts. It was written after I confidently believed something about a third-party tool, built on it, and found out I was wrong when the deployment failed.

What it looks like

A phone number. It answers.

What’s next

It works, so mostly I leave it alone. There is an experiment running on a second number with a deeper, quieter knowledge base and a much shorter script, to see what the voice becomes when it knows more and is told less.