AI Receptionist & Phone Answering Service
for Australian Businesses

How is the AI Receptionist different from an IVR?

An IVR makes callers press numbers through a fixed menu. The AI Receptionist lets them say what they want — “I’ve got a question about my invoice” — and matches that to the departments you have described, then transfers the call. No menu, no buttons, and a person on the other end.

That is the whole of its job, and it is worth being precise about, because the two are easy to confuse. The AI Receptionist does not hold a conversation, answer questions or take messages. You write a welcome message, describe each department in plain language, and point each one at a number, extension or ring group. When everyone is busy, a call queue holds the caller rather than dropping them to voicemail.

If you want the AI to answer questions rather than route them, that is the AI Agent below — and it is the layer most businesses end up using. If you want it to take a message when you cannot answer, that is the Answer Agent.

Can the AI take a message or book an appointment when you can’t answer?

Yes. The Answer Agent is a replacement for voicemail. Your phone rings first — 20 seconds by default, and you set the time — and if you do not get to it the AI answers in a natural voice, asks the caller for their name, best contact number and what they need, waits for each answer, and emails you the details with a full transcript and summary.

You write its introduction yourself and choose from 38 voices. The questions it asks are yours to set: the defaults are name, number and message, and you can add email address, account number, company name or a service type, mark any of them required, and have it read the details back to the caller to confirm before it finishes. Switch on Appointment Scheduling and callers can book a time in the same call.

It has two modes. Message only is a smart message-taker. Full also answers questions from your business profile before taking the message, so a caller asking whether you are open Saturday gets told rather than recorded. Every call lands under AI → Recordings in your portal with its transcript, alongside the email. Set up the Answer Agent →

Can the AI hold a full conversation and answer callers’ questions?

Yes. The AI Agent answers the call, talks with the caller, answers their questions and can handle the whole call without a person involved. It knows what to say because you tell it: a business profile with your contact details, description, opening hours, products and pricing, plus a free-text field of up to 65,535 characters for anything else, best written as question-and-answer pairs.

You decide when it is on — all the time, or only outside certain hours — and which lines or extensions it answers. You decide what happens when a caller asks for a human: keep them with the AI, or transfer them. You can run more than one agent, each pointed at different lines with a different profile, which is how a business with two brands or two locations gives each its own voice.

This is the layer to reach for when most of your calls are the same handful of questions. The accounting-firm case study describes the pattern: a practice whose reception became a bottleneck every tax season, and what changed when routine enquiries were handled by the AI before a person was needed. Appointment booking and CRM hand-offs from an AI Agent conversation are arranged with support rather than switched on in the portal. Set up an AI Agent →

Built into your phone system — not bolted on

Most standalone AI receptionist tools need you to forward your calls to a third-party service, which handles the call and then passes it back. Click2Call’s AI layers are part of the Cloud PBX itself, so they share the same call flows, extensions, ring groups and voicemail as everything else on your account.

That is why a transfer from the AI Receptionist to a member of your team is an internal transfer, exactly as if a person at a desk had done it — no forwarding, no delay, no second phone bill. It is also why every call the AI touches is recorded, transcribed and summarised by the same AI voice tools that cover your human-answered calls. Call recordings, transcripts and AI outputs are stored on servers in Australia and New Zealand.

What does it cost?

The AI Receptionist is included free on every Click2Call number — there is no separate AI subscription and no per-call fee. The cheapest way to run it is an Inbound Business Number at $10 per month ex GST, which also includes voicemail, voicemail transcription and call forwarding. A full Cloud PBX user is $25 per month ex GST.

Standalone AI receptionist services from other providers typically charge $100–$300 per month on top of your phone bill. Click2Call has no lock-in contract, runs on prepaid credit, and every account starts with a 7-day free trial and $11 credit. The Answer Agent and AI Agent are configured from the same portal — see current pricing →

How do I set it up?

In the portal, in under an hour, with no technician. Each layer has its own step-by-step guide with screenshots from the live portal, and support will point you to the right step if you get stuck.

1. 1
   AI Receptionist — write the welcome message, describe each department, point each at a number or extension, set it as the destination in the line’s call flow. Guide →
2. 2
   Answer Agent — on the line’s Voice Mail page, set the ring time, tick Send callers to the AI Answer Agent, choose the mode and voice, write the introduction, pick the questions. Guide →
3. 3
   AI Agent — create the business profile first, then the agent, choose when it is active and which lines it answers, and decide what happens when a caller asks for a person. Guide →

One thing catches people: the feature you configured has to be set as the destination in the line’s call flow. If calls are landing on a default voicemail greeting instead of your AI, that is almost always why.