Digital receptionist, virtual receptionist, IVR: they are not the same thing
These terms get used interchangeably in marketing copy and they describe genuinely different products. It is worth being precise, because buying the wrong one is the usual reason people conclude that “phone automation doesn’t work”.
An IVR — press 1 for sales, press 2 for accounts — is a menu. It routes, it does not converse, and callers have hated it for thirty years because it makes them do the work of finding the right department before they are allowed to speak.
Voicemail records. It resolves nothing, and most callers with a live problem simply do not leave one; they ring the next business on the results page.
A virtual receptionist is usually a human answering remotely, billed for their time.
A digital receptionist is software holding an actual conversation: it listens, works out what the caller wants, answers from real knowledge of your business, and takes an action — a message, a callback request, a transfer. The caller does not navigate anything. They just talk, the way they would to a person.
How it works, start to finish
You point a phone number at it. That can be a new number or your existing one forwarded — most businesses forward after hours first, then extend the hours once they trust it.
It reads your website and builds a knowledge base from what it finds: what you do, where you are, what you charge if you publish it, when you are open. That refresh runs again nightly, so published changes carry through without anyone re-briefing anything. On the Business plan you can add FAQs by hand for the things that live in your head rather than on your site.
When a call comes in, it answers in your business name and says it is an AI assistant. If it can answer the question, it does. If it cannot, it says so and takes a structured message — name, number, email, company, reason, urgency — which arrives in your inbox and dashboard with the transcript. If the call is urgent and your plan includes transfer, it rings your number and announces the caller and the reason before connecting, so you decide with the information in hand: press 1 to take it, 2 for a message, 3 to promise a call back in five minutes.
Nuisance and sales calls get logged and politely dealt with rather than forwarded, and repeat offenders are blocked automatically. Numbers you mark as VIP always come through.
Where the honesty policy comes from
Odette announces that it is AI in the opening sentence, on every call, and that is not negotiable in the product. It is tempting to sell the opposite — plenty do — but a caller who finds out afterwards that they were fooled feels tricked, and that feeling attaches to your business rather than to your software vendor. A caller who knows from the outset relaxes, gets to the point, and leaves a better message. Trust is the whole job of a front desk and you do not build it with an impression.
The same principle runs through the knowledge base. If something is not there, it says it does not know and takes a message, rather than producing a confident wrong answer about your prices or your opening hours. An AI that says “I don’t know” should not be remarkable. It still is.
What it cannot do
It does not write into a diary. It captures appointment and callback requests in full, but booking the slot is still yours. It makes no outbound calls, takes no card payments, and sends no SMS. Simultaneous calls are supported, but the number it can hold at once is governed by the concurrency on your own Twilio account, not by us.
What it costs
The licence is flat: £19 Solo, £49 Pro, £99 Business per month, 24/7 answering on every one of them. Call transfer and a custom name, voice and tone start on Pro; custom FAQs and unlimited team members on Business.
Underneath, you hold your own Twilio and ElevenLabs accounts and pay those providers directly at their published rates — roughly £2.80 a month for a number, about 1p a minute of telephony and 8p a minute of voice. On a busy line that is somewhere near £30 a month, so all-in you are typically under £50 for a Solo setup. We do not resell minutes and there is no margin on your usage, which also means there is no incentive anywhere in the model to keep your callers talking.
There is a 14-day free trial, and an optional one-off concierge setup at £99 +VAT if you would rather we created and wired the accounts for you.