How much does an AI receptionist cost in 2026?
DILR Voice is $0.14 a minute on Growth, plus a monthly fee per phone number, and it starts free with $10 of trial credits and no credit card. For comparison, human answering services publish plans that work out between roughly $1.95 and $5.00 per included minute: PATLive Pro is $1,170 a month for 600 minutes, which is $1.95 a minute, and Ruby Starter is $250 for 50 minutes, which is $5.00 a minute. So on published rate cards an AI receptionist runs roughly 14 to 36 times cheaper per minute. That is the honest arithmetic, but it is not the whole story: a human service is doing a different job, and the human rate only holds if you use your full allowance.
Is an AI receptionist cheaper than a human answering service?
Per minute, yes, and it is not close. On published rate cards the cheapest human plan we found is PATLive Pro at $1,170 a month for 600 included minutes, or $1.95 a minute. The dearest is Ruby Starter at $250 for 50 minutes, or $5.00 a minute. DILR Voice is $0.14 a minute. Two honest caveats. First, that effective rate assumes you use your full monthly allowance; use half and the human rate doubles. Second, PATLive publishes overage at $2.00 to $2.35 a minute, so going over is expensive on either side of the comparison. The real question is not price, it is whether the calls you get need a human.
What does an AI receptionist actually do?
It answers every inbound call 24 hours a day, identifies why the person is calling, answers questions using your own documents through a RAG knowledge base, books appointments, captures the caller's details, and transfers to a human when the call needs one. After the call it can trigger follow-up automatically: a CRM record, a text, a callback task. DILR Voice runs this as a multi-agent pipeline, so a call can hand off between specialised agents while keeping context, rather than one bot trying to do everything.
What do people on Reddit say about AI receptionists?
We are not going to tell you, because we cannot verify it. Reddit is not machine-readable for us, so any quote or thread summary we published here would be invented, and inventing Reddit sentiment on a page about honest pricing would be self-defeating. We have linked live Reddit searches below so you can read the actual threads and judge for yourself. That is the honest version of a "what Reddit says" section, and you should be suspicious of any vendor page that offers you tidy quotes instead.
How fast do you have to answer a lead?
The best research on this found that the odds of qualifying a lead drop about 21 times when your response slides from 5 minutes to 30 minutes, with a fourfold decline between 5 and 10 minutes. It is based on three years of data across six companies, more than 15,000 leads and over 100,000 call attempts. Worth knowing: this study is credited to Harvard Business Review almost everywhere online, and that is wrong. It is the Lead Response Management study led by Dr James Oldroyd, then at MIT Sloan, with InsideSales.com. HBR published a separate 2011 piece with different numbers. An AI receptionist answers on the first ring, which is the only response time that beats the curve entirely.
When should I hire a human answering service instead?
When the call is the product. If your callers are distressed, if the conversation needs real judgment or negotiation, if a wrong answer is a legal or safety problem, or if your brand is built on a person picking up, buy a human service and do not think about it again. The same applies if you take very few calls: at ten calls a month the price difference is rounding, and a human is better. AI receptionists earn their place on volume, on out-of-hours cover, and on the repetitive calls that are eating your team, not on replacing judgment.
Can an AI receptionist transfer to a human?
Yes, and this is the setting that makes the whole thing work. DILR Voice does warm human transfer: the agent recognises when the call needs a person, hands it to the right one and passes the context so the caller does not start over. The right design for most businesses is not AI instead of humans, it is AI answering everything on the first ring and escalating the calls that deserve a person, which is exactly the set of calls your team should have been getting all along.
Is DILR Voice HIPAA compliant for medical calls?
No. DILR Voice does not claim HIPAA and we will not sign a BAA for it. If you need HIPAA on the voice platform itself, Retell AI and Vapi both offer it and we have said so on our comparison pages. What DILR does have for healthcare is Dilr Mira, a class of private clinical models that run on your own hardware so patient data never leaves your environment. For UK clinics and GP practices, where the questions are usually GDPR and NHS data handling rather than HIPAA, see our AI receptionist for clinics page.
We do not reproduce Reddit quotes, because we cannot link you to a thread we have verified. Read the live discussion and judge it yourself: