AI telephony, briefly explained

AI answering machine

An AI answering machine takes calls when nobody is available, asks what the call is about in conversation and passes the request on in an orderly form.

AI disclosure requirement

Under Article 50(1) of the EU AI Act, people must be informed that they are interacting with an AI system unless this is obvious.

AI phone assistant

An AI phone assistant is software that answers calls on its own, understands spoken language and replies in conversation.

AI receptionist

An AI receptionist is an AI phone assistant that takes on the tasks of a front desk: answering calls, giving information, sorting requests and putting callers through.

Appointment booking by phone

In appointment booking by phone, an assistant offers a free slot during the call and enters the appointment directly in the calendar.

Barge-in

Barge-in is the ability of a voice system to stop its own output as soon as the caller starts to speak.

Call recording and consent

In Germany, recording a phone call is generally only permitted if the participants were informed beforehand and have consented.

Call transfer and warm transfer

In a warm transfer, a call is handed to a person who learns beforehand who is calling and why; in a cold transfer, the call is put through without that information.

CRM integration

A CRM integration connects the phone assistant to the customer database so that it can recognise contacts and store the results of calls there.

GDPR and data processing agreement (DPA)

A data processing agreement sets out, under Article 28 of the EU GDPR, how a service provider may process personal data on behalf of a business.

Hallucination

A hallucination is a statement by a language model that sounds convincing but is factually wrong or entirely made up.

Intent recognition

Intent recognition assigns a freely worded utterance to a request type, for example appointment, complaint or callback.

Knowledge base and RAG

A knowledge base holds the information an AI assistant is allowed to answer from; RAG is the method of retrieving matching passages from it before each reply.

Latency

For an AI phone assistant, latency is the time between the end of something the caller says and the start of the audible reply.

MCP (Model Context Protocol)

The Model Context Protocol is an open standard through which AI applications access external tools and data sources in a uniform way.

Multilingual support

For a phone assistant, multilingual support means that it can hold conversations in several languages.

Number porting

Number porting means taking an existing phone number along from one telephone provider to another.

Outbound call

An outbound call is a call that a business initiates itself; in AI outbound, a voice assistant conducts that conversation.

Overflow and after-hours

Overflow means that an assistant only takes the calls the team cannot manage at that moment; after-hours means that it takes over outside opening hours.

Per-minute pricing and flat rates

With per-minute pricing you pay for every minute of a call, with a package you pay a fixed monthly fee with included minutes; a true flat rate without a volume limit is rare in AI telephony.

Prompt

A prompt is the instruction in natural language that tells a language model how to behave and what to do.

Setting up call forwarding

Call forwarding automatically redirects incoming calls from one phone number to another number.

SIP trunk

A SIP trunk is a telephone line over the internet that connects a phone system or an application to the public telephone network using the SIP protocol.

Speech-to-text (STT)

Speech-to-text is the automatic conversion of spoken language into text.

Spoken dialogue system

A spoken dialogue system is a technical system that conducts a dialogue with people through spoken language.

Text-to-speech (TTS)

Text-to-speech is the automatic conversion of written text into spoken language.

Ticketing system

A ticketing system records every request as a case of its own with a status, an owner and a history.

Virtual phone answering service

A virtual phone answering service means that a business has its calls answered outside its own office, by the staff of a service provider or by software.

Voicebot and IVR

An IVR guides callers through a fixed menu using keys or keywords, whereas a voicebot understands freely spoken sentences and responds to them.

Webhook

A webhook is an automatic message that a system sends to a defined web address as soon as a particular event occurs.

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