Your office manager when customers ring.
Coming soon: the IBIOS AI Receptionist is not yet available. It will not be a phone-answering tool. It will be the same intelligent assistant as your office manager — delivered on voice.
When a customer rings, they are not speaking to a menu or a script. They are speaking to an assistant that knows their history, their open jobs, their outstanding quotes, and their last interaction. It reasons before responding. It notices things. It knows when to act and when to hand over. And it gets smarter with every call — no manual retraining needed.
Coming soon: what will make it office manager behaviour, not call centre behaviour
Does not just answer calls — thinks like your office manager would. Knows the customer's history, their open quotes, their last interaction. Reasons before responding.
Asks the right question when the answer is not obvious. When a request is ambiguous, it clarifies before acting — no wrong-path responses, no guesses that need unpicking.
Recognises returning customers, spots anomalies, suggests next actions to staff after the call.
Knows when to defer — complex queries go to a human, with full context handed over.
Same knowledge as the assistant your team uses during the day. The colleague who answered the call has the same information as the colleague you ask in person.
Detects and deflects manipulation attempts. When a caller tries to pressure, impersonate, or extract sensitive data, the AI holds its position without capitulating.
Speaks in your company's voice — Professional, Sincere, Polite, Firm. British English throughout.
Checks answers against your records. Asks to call back if it does not know the answer.
What will a call to the AI receptionist look like (coming soon)?
Compare two ways a customer can be handled when they ring about their job.
Without IBIOS
Customer rings to ask if their bath has been dispatched.
No one answers. They leave a voicemail.
Someone calls back later. They do not have the order details in front of them.
They promise to check and call back again.
The customer is still waiting for information that existed in the system the moment they first called.
With IBIOS AI Receptionist (coming soon)
Customer rings to ask if their bath has been dispatched.
AI Receptionist answers the call. Recognises the customer from the CRM.
Checks the supplier order record: acknowledged, expected delivery Thursday.
Tells the customer: “Your order has been acknowledged by the supplier and is expected for delivery on Thursday.”
Logs the call. Staff see the interaction in the dashboard. Customer has their answer on the first call.
Coming soon: what will the AI receptionist include?
Everything in this section is coming soon. These capabilities are part of the AI Receptionist and the IBIOS phone system, not separate products.
Calls answered when you can’t (coming soon)
Coming soon: when you are on another call, with a customer or away from the phone, the AI will pick up, answer from your own business knowledge, take a message with full contact details and alert you straight away. Simultaneous calls will be handled at once rather than sent to an engaged tone.
Call queue overflow
Coming soon: set a maximum wait time and, once a caller has waited that long, IBIOS will pass them to the AI Receptionist instead of voicemail. The AI will have the same booking and lookup abilities on an overflow call as on any other.
Natural voice synthesis
Coming soon: a neural voice built for real-time conversation, with natural pacing and intonation and low-latency synthesis so there is no awkward pause before each answer. Voice cloning (your brand, or a team member’s voice) is on the roadmap after launch.
Voicemail AI
Coming soon with the IBIOS phone system: every voicemail transcribed, summarised and linked to the customer record, with a callback task created automatically. Out-of-hours messages will appear in the morning briefing, most urgent first.
Missed-call urgency
Coming soon: every missed call rated for urgency from the signals available (new enquiry, a quote awaiting approval, repeat attempts, what the voicemail says), so the callback queue starts with the call that matters most. Staff can override any rating.
Screen pop for staff
Coming soon with the IBIOS phone system: when a known customer rings, their record (recent jobs, last quote, open orders, notes) will open on screen before anyone answers. Unknown numbers will open a new-customer panel with the number already filled in.
Live product lookups
Coming soon: before answering a product question, the AI will look the product up in your live IBIOS catalogue and answer only from what it finds, so it is designed not to guess stock or price. Only retail-safe fields are shared; cost prices and trade discounts are kept out of its answers.
Tone that adapts to the caller
Coming soon: the AI will read each caller turn as neutral, frustrated, anxious, confused, urgent or escalating and adjust its tone (acknowledgement and a slower pace for frustration, short direct answers for urgency). If a call is escalating, it will hand over to a person with full context.
AI Receptionist planned outcomes (coming soon)
Soon
Coming soon: answering on your existing business number when you can’t
Hand-off
Coming soon: complex calls passed to a person with full context
No
Coming soon: invented answers — every response to be grounded in your live data
Questions about AI Receptionist
What happens when a caller’s request is ambiguous?
The AI Receptionist is coming soon. When it launches, it will ask a clarifying question rather than guessing. If a caller says “I want to check on my order” without identifying themselves or the job, the AI will ask for their name and the job reference before looking anything up. This prevents wrong-path responses — a customer is never told the wrong information because the AI assumed which order they meant.
Does the AI get better over time?
When it launches (coming soon), yes. IBIOS is designed to improve its handling of your specific scenarios with every call. The patterns of how your customers enquire, the language they use, and the situations your business encounters most often are all learnt from your actual interaction history, with no manual retraining required from your team.
Does it protect against callers who try to manipulate it?
Coming soon: the AI Receptionist will include active manipulation defence. It is designed to recognise when a caller is attempting to pressure it into revealing sensitive information, impersonate a staff member or authority figure, or bypass normal process through urgency or flattery. In those cases it will not comply — it will acknowledge the caller professionally and hold its position.
Is the AI Receptionist just a phone menu or IVR system?
No. A phone menu presents options and routes callers. The AI Receptionist (coming soon) will hold a natural conversation. It will understand what the caller is asking, check your live data, and respond with a specific and accurate answer. A caller asking about the status of their bathroom order will get an answer based on the actual order record — not "press 1 for deliveries".
Does it work on my existing business number?
This is coming soon. When it launches, IBIOS will connect to your existing number via call forwarding. When a call is unanswered or arrives outside hours, it will divert to the AI Receptionist. Your customers will call the same number they always have, and you will be able to configure exactly when the AI answers versus when calls go to a member of staff.
Can it book appointments without me being involved?
When it launches (coming soon), yes. The AI Receptionist will check your live calendar before offering any slot and only confirm times that are genuinely available. When a slot is booked, it will appear in your IBIOS dashboard immediately and a confirmation text will be sent to the caller. You will not need to be available for the booking to happen.
What if the caller is rude or aggressive?
When it launches (coming soon), the AI Receptionist will not react to aggression in kind. It is designed to remain Professional, Sincere, Polite, and Firm throughout. If a caller becomes abusive, it will acknowledge the frustration, offer to connect them with a member of staff, and route accordingly. It will not capitulate to pressure or change its answers based on how forcefully a caller insists.
How does it handle calls about sensitive topics like complaints or disputes?
When it launches (coming soon), the AI Receptionist will recognise when a call involves a complaint or dispute and route it to a human with full context: the customer name, the job record, and a summary of what was discussed. It will not attempt to resolve sensitive disputes itself. The human colleague who takes over will have everything they need to handle the situation.
What happens when all my staff are busy and the queue builds up?
Coming soon: call queue overflow. You will set a maximum queue wait. If no one has picked up by then, the caller will be passed to the AI Receptionist instead of voicemail, with full access to bookings and your records. Overflow calls will be reported separately in the dashboard so you can see how many were handled and what happened.
Will callers be able to tell it is an AI?
Coming soon: it will speak in a natural neural voice designed for real-time dialogue, with low-latency synthesis so there are no awkward pauses. It will still disclose that it is an AI when asked directly. If the voice service is ever unavailable, calls will route to a member of staff rather than a degraded voice.
Can the AI Receptionist see my cost prices when answering product questions?
No. When it launches (coming soon), product answers will be grounded in a live lookup of your IBIOS catalogue, but only retail-safe fields (name, specification, availability, retail price) will be available to the customer-facing AI. Cost prices, trade discounts and supplier pricing will be excluded at the query layer, not just hidden on screen.
What happens to voicemails and missed calls?
Coming soon with the IBIOS phone system: every voicemail will be transcribed, summarised and given an urgency rating, and a callback task will be created even when no message is left. The callback queue will be ordered by urgency, not arrival time, and staff will be able to override the priority of any entry.
Which IBIOS product line includes the AI receptionist?
The AI receptionist is coming soon as its own product line, the IBIOS AI Receptionist; it is not live yet. It is built for plumbers and heating engineers. See also: AI receptionist vs answering service.
IBIOS (Integrated Business Intelligence & Operations System) is made by IBIOS Limited (NI743167), Northern Ireland. Access is by waiting list; there is no free trial.
Coming soon: your office manager answers every call.
IBIOS AI Receptionist is coming soon: it will answer on your existing business number when you can’t. Join the waiting list for early access.