The short version
An AI receptionist is software that picks up the phone, replies to the text, and answers the DM the way a good front desk person would. It asks what the customer needs, looks at your live calendar, offers real open times, writes the appointment in, and texts a deposit link if you take deposits.
The important word in that sentence is writes. A lot of tools that call themselves AI receptionists take a message and hand it to a human. That is an answering service with better marketing. The booking either happens inside the conversation or the customer goes and books somewhere else.
What separates it from a chatbot
A chatbot walks a decision tree. It has buttons, it matches keywords, and when the customer types something it did not anticipate, it says "let me connect you with someone." That is fine for a support widget. It loses appointments.
The difference in practice comes down to two things. First, the model actually reads what the customer wrote, in whatever words they used, including "hey do u have anything friday after 4." Second, it has write access to your schedule, so it can commit. Rex, our receptionist agent, runs on Anthropic Claude for text conversations and OpenAI gpt-realtime or xAI Grok for phone calls. It books into RexRuby's own calendar, or into Acuity, Jane, Zenoti, Boulevard, Google Calendar, or Cal.com if that is where your schedule already lives.
The channels it covers
A person at a desk answers one line at a time. An agent covers eight channels at once: SMS, voice, webchat, email, Instagram, Facebook, TikTok, and WhatsApp.
Two honest caveats. Voice answers for every business, no exceptions, because every org's number rings the agent. Instagram is on by default only for med spas, salons, and multi-location retail, where it is genuinely where the leads are. Facebook and TikTok stay switched off until you connect them yourself, which is deliberate: we would rather the promise be false in the direction of doing nothing than in the direction of a channel you did not know was live.
It speaks 11 languages
The language detector covers English, Spanish, French, Portuguese, German, Chinese, Vietnamese, Arabic, Farsi, Hebrew, and Armenian. It detects on the first message and holds the language for the rest of the conversation, so a customer who opens in Spanish is not answered in English on message four.
It has a voice, and you pick it
Fifteen voices ship: ten on OpenAI (marin, coral, sage, shimmer, alloy, cedar, echo, ash, ballad, verse) and five on Grok (rex, eve, ara, sal, leo). The ten OpenAI voices have real preview audio you can play during signup before you commit to anything. Medical and dental practices are locked to OpenAI, because Grok does not offer a HIPAA BAA covering call audio.
We do not clone voices. The backend for it exists and the interface is switched off on purpose.
What it costs
Plans start at $99.99 a month. There are 730 hours in an average month, which puts the entry plan at about 14 cents an hour of coverage. Pricing goes up by what the business needs rather than by call volume: $99.99 for solo operators and personal care, $199.99 for boutiques, real estate, and home and field services, $299.99 for med spas, salons, restaurants, and catering, $399.99 for multi-location retail, and $999 for medical and dental, which includes the HIPAA module and a signed BAA. No per-call fees and no performance cut, at any tier.
What happens after the appointment
Answering the phone is half of it. The other half is the customer who came in once and never came back. Ruby, the retention side of the product, watches the gap since each customer's last visit and reaches out when it hits 45 days. Contacts worked at that window come back at 5.4 percent against 0.8 percent for the ones nobody touches. She also handles no-show follow-up, first-visit check-ins, birthday notes, review asks, referral asks, and NPS. HIPAA practices get a narrower set, because birthday and win-back messaging is not appropriate for patients.
What it will not do
It will not write into your EHR or practice management system, because that integration does not exist. It works alongside your PMS and books through the platforms listed above. It will not pretend to know an answer it does not have; it escalates to you with the context already collected. And it will not book anything during a test call in Agent Studio, so you can hammer on it without polluting tomorrow's schedule.
How long it takes to set up
About twenty minutes. You name your business, name your agent, pick its voice from the previews, teach it your menu or service list, and talk to it in the browser before you enter a card. Set yours up at /start