FAQ

The switchboard for the AI era. Telephonist AI answers your business calls, day and night, and makes calls for you. Telephonist ID proves there’s a real, unique person behind every call our AI makes, so the people you call can trust it.

Hire your Telephonist for £1, all of it back as calls, then pay 30p a minute. No monthly fee.

AI can now hold a natural conversation on the phone, and clone a voice from a few seconds of audio. Soon a large share of calls will be made and answered by machines. Every business needs to answer every call, and everyone needs a way to tell a genuine AI call from a scam.

So that every business, however small, can answer every call, and so people can keep trusting the phone when AI is on the other end. We’re putting AI on the phones, so we prove every call.

£1 to hire your Telephonist, and it comes back as calls. Then 30p a minute for answered calls, AI or human, billed per second. There’s no monthly fee or subscription. Hiring saves your card, and automatic top-up adds £10 whenever your balance falls below £2; change it or turn it off any time. Or top up by hand, from £10 to £2,000 at a time. Other currencies follow fixed ratios: US$1 and US$0.30 a minute, for example. See pricing.

Then you’ve spent £1. Turn off automatic top-up in your account and we won’t charge you again. If you don’t top up within 30 days of hiring, we may release your number.

It picks up every call on your own UK number, answers from your business information, books callers into your Google or Outlook calendar and texts them to confirm, takes messages, and puts callers through to you or your team. After each call, you get a summary by email, Slack or your CRM. One of our people is on call as backup, around the clock.

Automatic top-up is on from the day you hire, so it shouldn’t: we add £10 whenever your balance falls below £2, up to £200 a month, and you can change those in your account. If you turn it off and your balance runs out, your Telephonist stops answering and calls go straight to your team’s phone, or callers can leave a callback request, until you top up.

Our identity layer for the phone. Every call our AI makes carries a signed statement of who stands behind it: Proof of Payment (a paying customer), Proof of Human (a real, unique person, proved once with the Telephonist iPhone app or World ID) and, with a passport, Proof of Identity. Benaiah AI Ltd answers for every call. Learn more.

Ask the caller for its reference, then enter it with the number we called at telephonist.ai/check. You’ll see whether the call is genuine, whether a verified person stands behind it, and who is accountable. Software can check calls too: see developers.

Yes, for calls placed through Telephonist. Set your rules at telephonist.ai/front-desk: anyone, Proof of Payment and above, Proof of Human only, or no AI calls. You prove the number is yours with a code. It’s free.

Yes. Add Telephonist to ChatGPT (it’s listed there as Benaiah) and ask it to call a business in the UK or US. You approve each call, and it tells you how it went. Your first call is free, up to 3 minutes.

Business lines are UK numbers today. Anyone can call our Telephonist from the UK, US, Canada, Australia, South Africa or New Zealand. More countries are on the way.

Talk to the orb on our homepage for a free 10-minute interview with your own Telephonist. When you’re ready, hire it for £1. We check your business registration and switch on your own UK number; then you divert your existing line to it, or share the new one.

Give £10, get £10. Every hired business has a link on its account page. When a business that hires through it makes its first top-up, it gets £10 of extra calls, and you get £10 of calls. How it works.

Yes. Workforce is the same Telephonist at every location, each with its own number, knowledge and hours, with reporting for head office. It’s quoted separately: telephonist.ai/workforce.

Your business is the controller of your callers’ data; we process it on your behalf under our data processing terms. Recordings are off unless you turn them on, with a spoken notice. We don’t use your calls to train AI. Privacy notice.