Give the assistant a specific job.
Start with a narrow task: explain opening hours, collect a callback request or identify which team a caller needs. A useful telephone assistant should know what it can answer, what information to collect and when it must stop and hand over.
Write down the business facts you approve. Include the exact trading name, opening hours, service area and the questions you are comfortable answering automatically. Prices, appointment availability and urgent requests need explicit rules rather than a plausible guess.
Example: a callback request for a repair business.
Start with a short brief a person could follow. This example shows the information to agree before testing an assistant; it is not a live call or an AI-generated response.
| Part of the brief | Example |
|---|---|
| Approved facts | Open Monday to Friday, 9am to 5pm. Repairs are assessed before a price is agreed. |
| Caller needs a callback | Ask for their name, callback number and a short description of the repair. |
| Caller asks for a price | Explain that a quote needs an assessment. Do not invent a price. |
| Caller needs a person | Use the agreed team destination. If nobody answers, offer the agreed message route. |
Decide when it should answer.
You may want help only outside opening hours, only when nobody picks up, or at the start of each call. These are different customer experiences. Choose the least complicated arrangement that covers the problem you are trying to solve.
If the assistant cannot help, the caller needs a clear next step: a transfer to a person, a voicemail or a callback request. Agree what happens if a transfer fails or the business is closed.
Test the difficult questions before ordinary ones.
Text testing is useful for checking wording and approved information. It does not establish how a telephone call sounds, how speech is recognised or whether a transfer reaches a real phone. Those need separate live call tests before launch.
- Ask for a service the business does not offer. The assistant should say so.
- Ask a question with a missing answer. It should arrange a handover rather than invent a fact.
- Give a callback number and check the message is captured accurately.
- Ask for a person who is unavailable and check the fallback.
- Try an urgent or sensitive enquiry and check that it follows your agreed escalation rules.
What you can explore in Xtra today.
Explore business information, answering hours, message notifications and transfer destinations in the demo. In the owner portal, a text preview lets you check answers against your approved business information.
Live AI voice answering is not available yet. Before a live trial, we need to connect and test the voice service, transfers and fallback. AI answering has no published live price and is not included in the workspace prices shown on this site.
Common questions.
- Is an AI phone assistant the same as a phone menu?
- No. A phone menu follows predefined choices, such as pressing 1 for Sales. A conversational assistant interprets a spoken request, which makes approved answers, error handling and human handover especially important.
- Will an AI receptionist replace the team?
- That is a business decision, not a requirement. A practical starting point is message taking or out-of-hours enquiries while people continue to handle complex calls.
- Can I buy live AI answering from Xtra now?
- Not yet. Receptionist configuration and text preview are available in the owner portal. Live voice answering is still being prepared and tested.
- Is AI answering included in the £9 workspace plan?
- No live AI answering service is included. The published workspace prices are planned phone-system prices. Any future AI service, usage allowance and charges would need to be agreed separately.
Reviewed 16 October 2026 by Xtra VoIP.