Learn / Inbound phone calls
Can AI answer the phone?
Replacing or fronting an IVR with something that understands speech.
What changes with AI
Improving quickly, and per-minute pricing makes the economics legible. Latency is the thing that makes or breaks it.
Where it goes wrong
Anything over about a second of silence reads as a broken line. Test latency on your actual telephony, not a demo.
Tools suited to this
Voice-first platforms rather than chat tools with a phone number attached.
PolyAI
Enterprise phone agents for brands with very high call volumes. No self-serve path.
Parloa
Contact-centre phone automation focused on sounding human rather than on channel breadth.
Replicant
Resolves routine calls end to end and hands the rest to a human. Narrow by design.
These are suitability judgements, not test results. They are based on what each platform is built to do, not on our own measured performance — we have not run tickets through them yet.