Glossary
AI receptionist
Also called: Virtual receptionist · AI answering service · AI front desk
An AI receptionist is an AI agent that picks up a business’s incoming calls and messages first, greets people, answers common questions and routes or records the rest.
A receptionist’s job is mostly triage: who is calling, what they need and who should handle it. An AI receptionist does this when the team is busy, after hours or for every call, and hands over anything it can’t settle.
Compared with voicemail or a phone menu, callers can say what they need in their own words. The risks are the same as for any AI phone assistant: it must say it is an AI, stay within the business’s information and pass people on quickly when they ask.
How Risti does it
In Risti, the AI receptionist is MaryAI, and she always says she is an AI. Under Where & when she can answer When nobody picks up (after 5–60 seconds), After hours (outside your working hours) or Always first. She answers calls and customer chats, and website visitors can talk to her from the chat widget.
For each topic she Answers alone, Takes a message or Hands to a person. With Open a ticket for every call on, she opens a ticket instead of a message: she asks for the location, when it happened, what happened and a number to call back, then reads them back. If nobody is free within 10–120 seconds of a hand-over, she takes a message.