Nine questions to ask before you buy an AI receptionist

Most AI call-answering demos are impressive and most of them tell you very little. The voice is good now. Everyone's voice is good now. What separates products in this category is what happens on the calls that are not the demo call, and almost none of that is visible in a scripted walkthrough.

These are the nine questions we would ask if we were buying rather than selling. Several of them are ones we have had to answer badly before we could answer them well.

1. What does it say when it does not know?

This is the single most diagnostic question, so ask it first. A system that improvises an answer about your fees, your availability or a caller's legal position is worse than a voicemail, because it creates a liability where you previously had an inconvenience.

Ask to hear a recording of a call where the caller asked something out of scope. If the vendor cannot produce one, that is the answer.

2. Does it tell the caller it is not a person?

Ask whether disclosure is a line in a prompt or a step in the call flow. It matters more than it sounds. A prompt is an instruction the model usually follows. A step in the call flow happens every time, including on the call where the model gets confused. For a regulated firm the difference is the whole point.

3. What happens when someone in distress calls?

Every firm gets these calls. Family and criminal practices get them constantly. Ask specifically: is there a check that runs on what the caller says, independently of the model, that can stop the assistant and hand over? Or is safety a paragraph of instructions and a hope?

4. Where does the data live, and who else sees it?

Ask for the sub-processor register, dated and versioned. Ask which of those agreements are signed rather than intended. Ask where inference happens, not just where records are stored, because they are frequently not the same country and only one of them tends to appear in the marketing.

A vendor that answers this crisply has thought about it. A vendor that answers with the word 'secure' has not.

5. Does it recognise a caller it has spoken to before?

An existing client ringing for an update should not be treated as a new enquiry. If the system opens every call from scratch, you have bought an answering service with a better voice, and your clients will notice before you do.

6. What does it do after the call?

This is where most of the value is and most of the demos go quiet. Does the call become a structured record with a category, an urgency, an owner and a next action? Does it reach your case management system? Or does it become an email that somebody has to read and retype?

The voice is the part you notice in the demo. The record underneath it is the part you live with.

7. Who decides when it answers?

Ask whether coverage is a firm-wide setting or a per-person one. A solicitor who cannot turn their own line back on, or who cannot leave it alone entirely, will work around the system within a fortnight, and a system people work around is worse than no system because you now believe you have coverage.

8. What does it promise the caller?

Listen carefully to whether the assistant commits your firm to anything. 'Someone will call you back within the hour' is a promise that a person now has to keep, and if nobody does, the assistant has actively damaged the relationship. The right behaviour is to say what will be done and not to invent a timescale nobody agreed to.

9. Can you start narrow?

Any vendor who needs your whole firm on day one is managing their own risk, not yours. A sensible first deployment is one office, one phone flow, two fee-earners on their own lines, and no privileged matter content in scope. If that is not on offer, ask why.

A note on the word receptionist

We do not use it, and the reason is not squeamishness. It describes the front-door half of the job and frames the whole thing as a cost to be reduced. The half that actually compounds is what happens to an enquiry over the following fortnight: whether it was recorded properly, whether it was chased, whether the fee-earner came out of court to a list of drafts or to seven voicemails.

If you are evaluating us against others, the questions above are the ones we would rather be judged on. Our answers to most of them are in the FAQ, and how the same model applies to your work is in practice areas.