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Best AI receptionists in 2026

No vendor wins outright, because the right answer changes with your call volume and how long your calls run. Answrr and Rosie tie for the cheapest plan with real minutes, and only Answrr includes booking at that price. NextPhone wins on volume. Answrr is also the only finished product here you can test without a card. Abby Connect is the safest pick if you might want people. Every choice below is justified with a published number.

Which AI receptionist is best for a solo operator?

Answrr Solo, $49 a month. It holds 250 minutes (4h 10m), which works out at $0.196 a minute inside the plan, and like every Answrr tier it includes calendar booking. Rosie Professional costs the same for 250 minutes. The obvious cheaper alternative is Dialzara Business Lite at $29, but that plan holds 60 minutes, or roughly one call a working day, at $0.483 a minute. Both give you 4.2 times the minutes for 1.7 times the price, so the cheaper headline is the more expensive product per minute of work done.

Where the two differ. Message taking is all Rosie's $49 tier does: appointment booking and warm transfer to a person start at the $149 Scale plan. Rosie also publishes no overage rate, so you cannot model a busy month, while Answrr publishes $0.25 a minute above the Solo bundle. Rosie's edge is language: it states English and Spanish, and Answrr's pricing page names no languages at all.

Which is best at high call volume?

NextPhone Pro, $199 a month for unlimited calls. No minutes, no overage, no surprises. The crossovers against per-minute vendors are calculable: Dialzara reaches $199 at 500 minutes and is capped there, Answrr at 1,600 minutes, Rosie at 1,000. Past those points you are paying overage for volume NextPhone gives away. The full working is in per minute against flat rate.

The catch is integrations. CRM connections to Clio, ServiceTitan and HubSpot only appear on the $299 Growth plan, so a firm that needs its receptionist writing into a CRM should price that tier, not the entry one. NextPhone also quotes prices as "starts at", so confirm your number before signing. For what it is worth, NextPhone runs no affiliate arrangement with us and still wins this category on the numbers.

Which can you test without a credit card?

Answrr. Their pricing page offers a free trial, no credit card required (length not stated on its pricing page), which is the only genuinely no-commitment trial among the finished products here. Their tier structure helps too: every plan includes every feature, so the trial shows you the real product rather than a stripped version, and the tiers differ only by minutes and number of agents.

Two alternatives if Answrr does not fit (all the no-card options are compared on what a free AI receptionist really gives you). Smith.ai runs a permanently free AI tier covering 25 calls, then $3.00 a call, which is enough to hear how it handles your callers. For anyone technical, Bland's Start plan needs no card either and charges $0.14 a minute all in, though you are building the agent yourself. Abby Connect states a free trial on every plan without publishing how long it runs.

Which is best if you might need real people?

Abby Connect, from $164 a month. Abby sells one ladder, $164 to $1,380, and you pick people or AI on the plan you already hold. Choosing AI does not cut the invoice: it multiplies the included minutes by 2, so 50 minutes on Starter becomes 100, and the effective rate per minute halves while the price stays put. That makes changing your mind mid-contract cheaper here than anywhere else on this page, because there is no migration between products. Spanish is included at every level either way.

Smith.ai is the alternative and suits a different buyer. It runs AI at $150 for 75 calls and live agents from $300 for 30 calls on one account, billed per call rather than per minute. That shape wins when a booked client is worth thousands and loses when you take many short calls. We compare the two tracks properly in AI receptionist against answering service.

Which is best when calls run long?

Goodcall Starter, $79 a month. It bills 100 unique customers with unlimited minutes, so call length stops being a cost at all. Put 10-minute calls through it and 100 callers is 1,000 minutes for $79, which is $0.079 a minute, well under anything a per-minute vendor can offer.

The exposure is the other direction. A month full of new callers costs $0.79 each above your limit on Starter, and the cheaper rate on Growth ($0.26 each above 500 unique customers) is the reason to move up once callers pile up. Starter also keeps call history for 30 days and allows 1 team member, so a shared front desk needs the tier above. Goodcall pays us nothing and is still the right answer for consultative businesses that spend real time on the phone.

Which handles phone, text and chat together?

My AI Front Desk Business-in-a-Box, $99 a month. It covers 200 voice minutes plus 20 outbound calls a day, 400 SMS, 100 chats, 1,000 overage credits a month included, in one product with 20 or more languages, which no other vendor in this data set matches at the price. Setup is advertised at five minutes and there is a 7-day trial.

Ignore Dialzara's $19 AI SMS Agent completely. It is the lowest published price on our whole site and it answers no phone calls: it covers two-way SMS only, no phone answering: $0.05 per AI message plus carrier fees of $0.0083 per segment. Also convert the billing before you compare it with anyone: My AI Front Desk uses a credit pool where voice costs 25 credits a minute and $10 buys 1,000 credits, so a minute is about $0.25. More on that in the hidden costs of AI receptionists.

Which is best for a restaurant?

Slang.ai Core, priced per location by quote. It is not a general receptionist and does not pretend to be. It handles reservations, text confirmations and reservation-system integrations, and bilingual support is now listed on Core. Premium adds 97 languages, custom branding, cross-selling and real-time alerts.

Price it per site before you get attached. Every plan is now "Get a quote"; the last prices their page showed, on 2026-09-25, were $399 for Core and $599 for Premium a month per location, so four sites on Core started near $1,596 a month, with no free trial. A single-site restaurant that mostly needs calls answered rather than tables booked will do better with a general AI receptionist at a third of the price. A group that lives on OpenTable will not.

Which ones can we not recommend?

Two vendors are impossible to compare because they publish no usable price for the product itself. Nexa lists plan sizes with no numbers attached. Podium now shows prices for its base plans, but still none for the AI Employee add-on, which is the number that matters here. We keep both visible on the pricing index, because refusing to publish a price is itself information. Simple Phones used to sit in this bucket too; it now sells three plans through a live checkout from $49 a month, so it has moved into the comparable pool.

Two more come with warnings rather than exclusions. Synthflow no longer sells to small businesses at all: its plans now start at $30,000 a year, so any article quoting it at $29 a month is out of date. Jobber's $29 receptionist is real, but it requires a Jobber subscription, making the true entry price $78 a month, and the add-on covers 30 conversations a month, then $0.79 each. The cap goes away on the Plus plan, where the receptionist is included rather than billed separately, though Plus only appears once you set their pricing page to two seats or more.

How do you check this against your own numbers?

Work out what you are losing before you decide what to spend. Put your weekly call count, the share you miss and what a customer is worth into the calculator. If the monthly figure comes back under $49, none of these products earn their price yet and the honest advice is to wait.

Where to go next

• Every vendor price in one sortable table
• What an AI receptionist costs at 100, 300 and 600 minutes
• Where each billing model stops being the cheap one
• The costs hiding behind the headline rates
• AI against a human answering service, priced at the same vendor
• Best answering services if you would rather have people