The 24/7 AI virtual receptionist that qualifies every lead before it lands on your calendar.
Not a message-taker. A trained receptionist that runs BANT — or your own intake script — on every visitor, qualifies budget and urgency, and books only the leads worth your time. $197/mo flat. Chat + voice. Unlimited. Live in 10 minutes.
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By plan, price, and use case
The virtual receptionist angle that matches your business.
The front desk a 1–10 person business can actually afford.
Virtual Receptionist for Small Business
A 24/7 virtual receptionist for small business. Books appointments, qualifies leads, runs the front desk. $197/mo flat. No per-call fees. No call cap.
Read the playbook
Receptionist pricing in plain English.
Virtual Receptionist Pricing
Virtual receptionist pricing — Ovox $197/mo flat vs Ruby $235/mo (50 min), Smith.ai $292.50/mo (30 calls), AnswerConnect $325/mo (100 min). Compare here.
Read the playbook
The receptionist is the agent — same product, different surface
Where else this same agent shows up.
The virtual receptionist on this page is the same Ovox agent we ship under three other names — depending on how the buyer phrases what they want.
AI sales agent
For buyers who want a closer, not a coordinator.
Same product, framed for sales teams who want every conversation to end with a booked appointment in their calendar.
Lead qualification chatbot
Run BANT or your custom intake on every visitor.
Same agent, framed for revenue ops teams who want the chat to qualify the lead before it lands on a rep’s calendar.
AI chat widget
Chat + voice in one embed on your site.
Same agent, framed for owners who started by searching for “chat widget” instead of “virtual receptionist.”
What an AI virtual receptionist actually is
A trained receptionist that runs your intake — not a glorified voicemail.
The traditional virtual receptionist is a friendly human at a call center in a different time zone, charging $1.20 a minute to greet callers and email you the message. An AI virtual receptionist is a trained agent that picks up in <3 seconds, runs your actual intake script (BANT, custom, or vertical-default), qualifies budget and urgency, books the appointment straight into your calendar, and posts the cleaned-up lead card to your inbox before the call ends.
AI virtual receptionist vs. human virtual receptionist: the math
Per-minute vs. flat. Ruby Receptionists, Smith.ai, AnswerConnect all price per minute, somewhere between $0.95 and $1.40. Run 100 calls a month at an average of 6 minutes each and you're at $570–$840. Ovox is $197/mo flat, unlimited inbound. The break-even is ~210 minutes of human-answered time per month.
Coverage. Human virtual receptionists typically cover ~12–18 hours a day on the base plan; full 24/7 is an upcharge. AI is 24/7 by default at the same flat price.
Speed. Human pickup is 8–25 seconds in the published benchmarks. AI is <3 seconds, every time.
Intake depth. Human virtual receptionists read scripts you provide. They are great at the standard greeting + capture-message pattern; less good at multi-step qualification (insurance verification, budget capture, urgency triage). AI runs the full intake script verbatim on every call, including the parts a human would skip when they're tired.
Where humans still win. Empathetic intake (worried-patient calls, grief-related calls at funeral homes), judgment-heavy escalations, deep specialty conversations where the receptionist needs subject-matter expertise on the call. Ovox routes these to a human on your team; we don't try to replace the human in those moments.
What an AI virtual receptionist should be able to do (checklist)
Pick up every call. Inbound voice and inbound chat, 24/7, sub-3-second pickup. No queue, no “please hold.”
Run your intake script verbatim. If your intake is “ask new vs. existing patient, ask insurance, ask reason for visit, ask earliest availability,” the AI runs that script the same way on every call. You don't retrain a new receptionist every six months.
Book straight into your calendar. Google Calendar, Outlook, Cal.com, Calendly, Acuity, or any iCal-compatible system. Live availability, buffer time respected, double-booking prevented.
Route the right calls to humans. Anything emergency, anything escalation-worthy, anything the script flags as “put a human on this” gets routed to the right on-call rep with a warm handoff and the conversation context preserved.
Post clean lead records. Every interaction becomes a tagged record in your CRM (HubSpot, Pipedrive, Salesforce, Follow Up Boss, GoHighLevel, Zoho, etc.) with the source, the intent, the next action, and the booked appointment time.
Speak your customers' language. 20+ languages out of the box. Bilingual fallback for Sunbelt Spanish, Quebec French, Welsh, etc.
When to pick AI vs. human virtual receptionist
Pick AI if your calls are intake-shaped (qualify, book, route), your team is rarely at the front desk, your call volume is more than ~200 minutes/month, you want 24/7 coverage, or you want predictable flat pricing instead of per-minute meter.
Pick human if your calls are high-empathy support (mental health, hospice, certain healthcare specialties), if your call volume is genuinely tiny (under 30 calls/month), or if you need a single named receptionist who learns your business over years.
Run both for the hybrid case: AI for the 90% intake calls, human virtual-receptionist on-call for the 10% complex escalations. See the virtual receptionist explainer for how to design the routing rules.
Sources & verification
Last reviewed May 2026. We re-check every entry quarterly. Spot something stale? Email contact@ovox.ai and we fix it the same day.
Frequently asked
Questions service-business owners ask about virtual receptionists.
How is this different from an “answering service”?
An answering service is the older category — humans in a call center who take messages and email them to you. A virtual receptionist is supposed to actually run the intake and book the appointment. In practice the two have blurred and most vendors offer both. Ovox does both as one product: it picks up the call, runs the intake script, books the appointment, and posts the lead record — whether you sell it to your customers as “answering service” or “virtual receptionist.” See the answering service hub for the answering-service framing of the same product.
Will the AI know my business well enough to answer questions?
Ovox is trained on your website automatically — the agent reads every page on your site during onboarding and answers visitor questions from that knowledge base. You can also paste in additional context (policies, pricing notes, FAQ docs) that the agent should know. Most owners are surprised how much the agent picks up on its own from the existing site.
What does Ovox cost vs. Ruby and Smith.ai?
Ovox is $197/mo flat for unlimited inbound. Ruby starts at $315/mo for 50 receptionist minutes, then $1.45 per additional minute. Smith.ai is $292.50/mo for 30 calls plus $7.50 per additional call. The break-even is usually inside the first 30 days for any business handling more than ~50 calls/month. See the side-by-side breakdowns at Ovox vs Ruby and Ovox vs Smith.ai.
Does the AI handle voice calls or just chat?
Both, on the same agent. Voice is via your existing phone number (you forward unanswered calls to Ovox); chat is via a widget on your website. The agent has the same intake script, the same calendar logic, the same CRM routing — whether the conversation started on the phone or in the chat box.
What if I want a human to take over a specific call?
The agent escalates per your rules. “Any new commercial inquiry over $50k project value → warm-transfer to the owner.” “Any emergency on a Sunday → page the on-call tech.” “Any caller who asks for the manager → route to the owner.” The rules are configured per business and the warm handoff preserves the conversation context so the human picks up where the agent left off.
Still on the fence? Email us directly — we read every message.
Pricing
Everything Ovox does.
$197 a month.
One price. Everything included. No tiers, no annual contracts, no surprise upsells.
Total package value
$3,000/mo
Your price
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- A 24/7 AI sales agent that knows your business cold. Trained on your website in 30 seconds. Speaks your services. Sounds like one of your team — chat or voice, the customer's choice.
- Captures the customer details that close the deal. You decide what every conversation must extract — budget, urgency, insurance, project type, anything. Ovox brings back exactly that. No more, no less.
- Books straight into your calendar. Conflict-checked. Customers leave with an appointment. You wake up to a full week.
- One-screen lead emails. Not transcripts. Name, what they want, when they want it, one tap to call. The action card every sales rep wishes their CRM sent.
- Sits on top of the tools you already run. Dentrix, ServiceTitan, Clio, Booksy, Jobber. Ovox feeds them — never replaces them. Zero migration. Zero switching cost.
- Live on your site in 10 minutes — or we set it up for you. No 6-week rollout. No agency. No “come back next quarter.”
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While you finished reading this page,
a customer landed on a competitor's site
and got the conversation started immediately.
That customer isn't coming back. Neither is the one before. Or the one tomorrow at 9pm.
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