AI answering service for Australian businesses

What an AI answering service does on a call

The agent answers on the first ring and holds a spoken conversation. The caller says what they need in their own words, with no menu to press through.

During the call the agent reads your calendar or CRM, so it can confirm a booking while the caller waits. When the call ends it sends the text it promised and writes a summary for your team.

It hands over the calls that need a person. A complaint or a question about a price nobody configured goes to your team as a transfer or a message.

• Answers the number you already advertise, forwarded to the agent, or a new Australian number.
• Takes the caller's name, number and reason, and sends it to you with the transcript.
• Books, moves or cancels an appointment in Google Calendar, Calendly or your CRM.
• Answers questions from your knowledge base, in your wording.
• Transfers to a nominated number with the caller's details attached.
• Answers 2 calls at once on Starter, 6 on Growth and 12 on Scale.

Four ways to answer a business line

Most Australian businesses choose between voicemail, a receptionist on staff, a human answering service and an AI answering service. The table sets the four side by side.

What our AI answering service handled in 2026

These figures come from inbound calls our AI receptionists answered for Australian businesses over a 90-day window in 2026. Each business counts once. A figure is published only when at least 10 businesses and 1,000 calls sit behind it.

28 per cent of calls started outside 9am to 5pm on a weekday, in the business's own time zone. 12.9 per cent came after 5pm on a weekday, 7.6 per cent before 9am and 7.5 per cent on a weekend.

37.4 per cent came from a number that had already rung the same business in the window. Caller memory on our Growth and Scale plans lets the agent pick up where the last call ended.

What an AI answering service costs

Our plans are A$299, A$599 and A$999 a month, GST included, with 500, 1,000 and 2,000 connected minutes. Extra minutes are A$0.40. Billing runs only while the agent is on a call, rounded up to the minute.

A human answering service costs less on a quiet line. A message-only plan costs less than our Starter plan up to 114 calls a month, and a plan that transfers calls costs less up to 71, both with GST added.

Nine other Australian AI vendors publish standard plans from A$49 a month at Giday to A$997 at New Callings, read 8 October 2026. AnswR Business works out at A$0.27 a minute against A$0.50 on our Scale plan, so on talk time alone it costs less.

Where an AI answering service is the wrong choice

Keep a person on the line when callers are distressed, or when each call needs judgement you cannot write down. The agent follows the knowledge and call flow you give it, and passes anything outside them to your team.

Keep a human service when your line takes fewer than 72 calls a month and each call has to be put through. The per-call plan costs less at that volume.

Expect some callers to hang up on any automated greeting. 8.2 per cent of calls on our lines ended within 10 seconds of connecting.

Where the call data is stored

Transcripts, recordings, agent configuration, analytics and audit logs sit in Postgres on AWS ap-southeast-2 in Sydney. Model inference runs on AWS Bedrock in Sydney, and voice compute runs on Fly.io in Sydney.

Speech recognition runs on Cartesia in the United States by default and can move to Deepgram in Sydney. The voice, ElevenLabs by default, and the phone carrier, Telnyx, are United States vendors named on our sub-processors page.

A redactor masks card numbers, Tax File Numbers, Medicare numbers and US Social Security numbers before a transcript is written. Retention is 30 days on Starter and 90 on Growth, and you set it on Scale.

Six questions for an answering service provider

Each question has an answer a provider can put in writing.

• Which vendors handle the audio and the transcript, and in which countries?
• What does a transfer hand to the person who picks up?
• Can the agent read your calendar or CRM during the call?
• What does the caller hear outside your answering hours?
• What is the rate once the included minutes or calls run out, and is hold time billed?
• Can you change what the agent says yourself, without a support ticket?