Glossary
AI phone assistant
Also called: AI voice agent · AI call assistant · Voice AI agent
An AI phone assistant is software that answers phone calls with a synthetic voice, understands what callers say and replies, takes messages or passes the call to a person.
Phone assistants combine speech recognition, a language model and speech synthesis. The useful ones answer from the business’s own information, such as a knowledge base, and say so when they don’t know rather than making something up.
Callers should know they are talking to an AI. Some laws require it, and it sets fair expectations. A clear way to reach a person, for upset callers or questions the assistant can’t handle, matters more than how human the voice sounds.
How Risti does it
In Risti, the phone assistant is MaryAI, the default AI agent, set up by owners and admins in Settings › AI agents › Agents › MaryAI. She always says she is an AI and that the call is recorded; this is fixed in AI policy and nobody can turn it off. She answers in the caller’s language (Uzbek, Russian or English) from the Library, and says so when something is not in your sources.
Profile sets her Intro words, voice (Mary or Ahror), speed and Reply length. Where & when picks the lines and when she answers, Topics sets what she does per topic, Tickets can open a ticket for every call, and Hand-over passes the call to a team or anyone available, who sees a summary first. Try it makes a test call in the browser, and Usage shows AI call minutes against the plan. More on MaryAI.