4 min read · updated 2026-10-18
Do you need a website chatbot, an AI receptionist, or a person answering?
Short answer
A website chatbot meets people who are already on your site and willing to type. An AI receptionist meets people who dial your number. A human answering service is a person taking that call, often to pass a message on. If customers call while you are on a job, start with the phone. If they browse and ask the same questions, start with chat. If the caller is upset or the decision is not written down, a person should take it.
They get sold as the same product
All three are marketed as a way to stop missing customers. They do not meet the same customer. A chatbot never hears the phone. A phone assistant never sees the visitor who will not call. A human service can hear tone and hesitation, and it usually ends by taking a message rather than booking the job.
Buy the one that sits where the work actually arrives. Buying chat to fix missed calls solves a different problem from the one you have.
What each one can finish
Chat, on this site, is the $150 package: your own answers, a name and an enquiry, an email when someone writes. It does not book and it does not pick up the phone.
Booking from a live calendar is $300, still in chat. Voice on a phone number, with a CRM record and a handoff, is $500. That is the receptionist. It should book only from real availability, and it should stop when the question is outside the list you approved.
A human answering service is a different vendor. It is the right call when volume is low and the conversations need judgement, comfort, or an exception you have not written a rule for. Its weak version takes a message and leaves your team to retype it. If you use one, the message still has to become one record with an owner, or you have only moved the leak.
A sensible order
Phone-led trades: answer the number before you decorate the website. The assistant handles hours, service area, and a real slot, and a person gets anything else.
Sites that already get the questions in a form or a chat box: the $150 assistant, then booking if people are ready to pick a time on the page.
Messages that already arrive and then get copied into a sheet: that is a workflow, from $120, not a new voice. An assistant in front of a broken intake answers the customer and loses them afterwards.
What I will not price for you
Hosted receptionists and human services publish their own monthly or per-minute fees, and those change. I will not quote their plans as if they were mine, and I will not quote a percentage of calls you are missing. The comparison that matters is the job: who is reached, whether a booking is made, and whether a person is told when it fails.
This is what I do: AI Agents & Voice Assistants — three packages from $150.
