The 8 best AI answering services for small businesses

Some AI answering services are genuinely impressive—easy to set up, sound natural on the phone, and actually help you book appointments or qualify leads. But after testing over 30 different platforms, I found that many just don’t deliver. They’re clunky, confusing, or so robotic that I wouldn’t trust them to answer my own business calls.

I’ve run a small business myself, and now I work on a product in this space. Over the past few months, I personally tested more than 30 AI answering services.

After all that testing, here are the 8 best AI answering services for small businesses—ranging from beginner-friendly picks to highly customizable tools for more tech-savvy owners.

How we evaluated and tested these small business phone answering services

I tested over 30 AI phone answering tools while writing this article—and I can confidently say: a lot of them aren’t worth your time.

As someone who used to run a small business myself, I know how chaotic it gets when you're juggling customer calls, shipments, and everything else that goes into running a company. So I took this seriously. For each tool I reviewed, I signed up for a real account (paid when necessary), forwarded calls from my personal cell phone, and ran it through the same exact test.

I imagined I was a veterinarian—someone who’s too busy to answer every call but still wants to deliver a professional, responsive experience. I looked at how well each AI receptionist could:

• Take a message
• Answer common questions (like pricing or hours)
• Transfer urgent calls
• Send a link to schedule an appointment

On top of that, I scored each service on ease of setup, voice quality, latency (how slow or fast the AI took to respond), and whether the responses actually sounded human—or like a clunky chatbot. I also flagged pricing gotchas and standout features that might make one service a better fit than another.

Only 8 tools made the cut. The rest didn’t feel polished, were painfully slow, or just didn’t do what they claimed.

What makes the best AI phone answering service?

Most small business owners don’t have time to fiddle with complicated software. They just want something that works and can be set up quickly.

The best AI phone answering services sound human, respond naturally, and can be trained in under an hour to fit your business’s unique workflow. Whether you’re running a veterinary clinic, law office, or property management company, you should be able to tell the AI how to handle calls—without needing an engineering degree.

Here’s what I looked for during testing:

• Quick, intuitive setup. A great virtual receptionist shouldn’t take more than an hour to get up and running. If I needed a sales call just to test it or got stuck trying to configure it, that was a red flag.
  
• Realistic voice quality. I tested all services by calling them from my own cell phone to hear how they’d sound to an actual customer. If the voice was robotic or awkward, the tool didn’t make the cut.
  
• Call handling essentials. The best tools could take messages, transfer calls, send texts, and answer basic FAQs like business hours or pricing.
  
• Easy customization. Every business is different. I gave extra points to services that made it easy to teach the AI how to handle specific types of calls.
  
• Transparent pricing. I avoided services that tried to hide costs behind confusing “credits” or charged extra for every little feature.

Some services also included standout features like CRM integrations, outbound calling, or two-way texting. I’ve highlighted those where they might be helpful for certain businesses, even if they weren’t core to my testing.

1. Upfirst

If you’re a small business owner who doesn’t want to mess with complicated tech, Upfirst is the platform I’d recommend first. It was built specifically for small businesses by the same team behind SimpleTexting (used by over 17,000 SMBs), and it shows. The founder originally created it to manage calls at his own law firm—so every feature is built with real-world needs in mind.

Upfirst manages to pack in powerful features—like SMS, call transfers, custom Q&A, and spam blocking—without overwhelming you. The interface is clean and structured, and you never have to touch a drag-and-drop flow builder or write a single prompt.

One thing I loved: there’s no cap on your knowledge base. Most other tools limit how much info you can teach the AI unless you upgrade. Upfirst lets you add as much context and detail as your business needs from day one. This makes it flexible to use, whether you need a property management answering service or law firm virtual receptionist.

It also nails the follow-up. After each call, the message taking service sends you get a concise summary with the most important info listed right at the top—perfect for busy owners who don’t have time to scroll through transcripts or listen to voicemails. You can get summaries by email or SMS.

And because the platform was built for phone-first businesses, the latency is low and the AI sounds natural. There’s even built-in spam blocking, and you’re not charged for calls under 15 seconds.

Upfirst pros:

• Built by and for small business owners
• No limit on knowledge base entries
• Easy-to-skim call summaries with SMS alerts
• Sends and receives texts
• Spam call filtering and short-call protection
• Zapier integration to push call data into other tools
• Surprisingly low latency and natural responses
  

Upfirst cons:

• Zapier only allows pushing data out—not pulling data in
• No outbound calling
  

Standout feature

The call summaries are best-in-class. You get a clean, structured summary with the key details front and center—no digging through transcripts or re-listening to calls.

Upfirst pricing

• Starter: $24.95/month — includes 30 calls, $1.50 per additional call
• Premium: $59.95/month — includes 90 calls, $1.00 per additional call
• Pro: $159.95/month — includes 300 calls, $0.75 per additional call

2. Phonely

Phonely is the most customizable AI phone answering service I tested...but that cuts both ways. If you’re a software nerd or someone who doesn’t mind poking around advanced settings, you’ll be impressed by the level of control. If not, you might find it a bit much.

The platform lets you fine-tune everything from VAD (voice activity detection) confidence thresholds and buffer lengths to which LLM models power the transcriber and the voice agent. You can even adjust how long the AI pauses before speaking, or add human-like vocal tics like “umm” and “uhh” to make responses sound more realistic—and surprisingly, they do.

There’s a flow builder at the heart of the system. If you’ve used Zapier, it’ll feel familiar. If you haven’t used a visual flow builder before, expect a learning curve. Thankfully, Phonely includes a few pre-built flows for common industries, which helps you get oriented faster.

Phonely is also HIPAA and PCI compliant, which might make it a strong pick for medical or finance-related businesses.

Phonely pros:

• Extremely customizable, down to the smallest technical detail
• Excellent voice quality with optional vocal tics that sound surprisingly human
• Pre-built flows help reduce the learning curve
• HIPAA and PCI compliant for regulated industries
  

Phonely cons:

• Definitely not beginner-friendly
• Advanced settings can be overwhelming
• Interface could use more hand-holding for small business owners
  

Standout feature

The ability to control nearly every aspect of the voice agent including how quickly it responds, how long it listens, and even whether it says “umm” or “uhh”. This is the power-user’s answering service.

Phonely pricing

• Starter: $33/month for 200 minutes
• Professional: $100/month for 600 minutes
• Business: $335/month for 2,000 minutes

3. Goodcall

Goodcall was originally built during a Google hackathon and now has serious backing from top investors. That’s worth noting in a category flooded with shaky side projects that might vanish overnight.

The voice quality is decent and once you get the hang of the system, it’s surprisingly powerful. That said, the learning curve is real. Goodcall uses a system of “skills,” “flows,” and “documents” to control how your AI voice agent responds to callers. It took me some time to figure out how all those parts work together, but once I did, I was able to fine-tune the agent to handle a variety of scenarios—like quoting prices, asking screening questions, or transferring urgent calls.

Goodcall pros:

• Highly customizable logic flows and responses
• Trusted, well-funded company with long-term potential
• Smart fallback behavior when answers aren’t found
• Straightforward pricing (per agent, with customer volume limits)
  

Goodcall cons:

• The interface can be confusing at first
• Took a long time to train my agent
• Out-of-the-box agent performance was underwhelming until configured
• Some edge cases still feel a bit unpolished. I struggled to send myself texts using the AI agent.
  

Standout feature

The “skills” + “flows” model lets you create rich, layered workflows. You can trigger forms, ask qualification questions, or send a message—all based on what your caller says. You can even upload documents and customize what the agent says when it doesn’t know an answer.

Goodcall pricing

Goodcall plans start at $59/month per agent for up to 100 unique callers. That includes unlimited minutes and tokens, plus support for one logic flow and one form. Higher tiers unlock more logic flows, directory contacts, forms, and customer volume:

• Growth: $99/month for 250 unique customers and 3 logic flows
  Scale: $199/month for 500+ customers, 25 logic flows, and more team access
• Each additional caller beyond the plan’s limit is $0.50 per customer
• Free trial available

4. My AI Front Desk

My AI Front Desk was one of the most intuitive tools I tested. During onboarding, you select the features you care about (like call transfers or appointment booking), and the platform walks you through setup step by step. If you’re in a hurry, that experience might feel a little overbearing, but after trying so many platforms with confusing interfaces, this was a welcome change.

What really stood out was how simple it was to customize behavior. Unlike some tools that rely on flowcharts and logic nodes, here you just type plain instructions like: “Ask these questions when someone wants to book an appointment.”

You can also schedule a free onboarding call and some advanced features—like their website widget—require you to do that call. But once unlocked, the feature set is impressive: there’s a wide library of premium voices, plus the option to clone your own voice, which is rare at this price point.

It’s also one of the few tools I tested that had a fallback mechanism for hard-to-hear info: if a caller mumbles their email address or has a tricky last name, the AI can ask them to text the info instead.

My AI Front Desk pros:

• Smooth, guided onboarding with clear setup flows
• Easy to customize without needing a visual flow builder
• Voice cloning included on larger plans
• Integrates with Zapier, GoHighLevel, and Housecall Pro

My AI Front Desk cons:

• More expensive than some competitors
• Basic plan limits you to 10 pages of knowledge and 2 transfer contacts
• Some features are locked behind an onboarding call

My AI Front Desk pricing

• Starter: $65/month – includes onboarding, voice library, 10 knowledge pages, and 2 transfer contacts
• Pro: $97/month – unlocks unlimited workflows, integrations, analytics, and more
• White Label: Starts at $194/month – includes branding and reseller features

5. Echowin

Echowin makes it surprisingly easy to get started—especially when it comes to training your AI receptionist. Instead of clicking through a maze of settings or logic nodes, you land directly on a “training instructions” screen after sign-up. From there, you can type prompts just like you would in ChatGPT.

You can also define more advanced tools like scheduling, texting, or call transfers right inside that same training prompt.

Want to send a pricing link? Just say:

“If a caller asks about pricing, send them a text that says ‘Here’s our pricing: [example.com/pricing]’”
And that’s exactly what the receptionist will do.

While Echowin is primarily focused on voice calls, there’s a web chat widget you can embed on your site. And the platform includes some fun extras, like sentiment analysis that tells you whether calls were happy, neutral, sad, or angry. It’s a cool idea, though in my testing the emotional accuracy wasn’t always spot-on.

The biggest downside is the pricing model. Echowin uses a credit-based system where every voice minute or chat message consumes a portion of your credits. It’s flexible, but can be confusing for small businesses trying to predict costs. You can mix and match voice and chat usage across tiers, but overages cost $1 per 100 credits.

Echowin pros:

• Simple, prompt-based setup
• Easy to add tools like texting and call transfers inside a single prompt
• Supports voice and web chat
• Sentiment analysis on calls (happy/sad/angry tagging)

Echowin cons:

• Credit-based pricing makes it hard to estimate monthly cost
• Sentiment analysis isn’t always accurate
• Some features require manual fine-tuning
  

Standout feature

The ChatGPT-style prompt training is a breath of fresh air. You can “train” your receptionist in plain English and immediately test how it behaves—no need to mess with flows, nodes, or developer jargon.

Echowin pricing

Echowin uses a credit system. You can mix and match voice calls and chat messages with any plan:

• Tier 1: $109.99/month — includes 7,600 credits (~500 minutes or ~2,000 chats)
• Tier 2: $175.99/month — includes 14,200 credits (~1,000 minutes or ~4,200 chats)
• Tier 3: $361.99/month — includes 32,800 credits (~2,500 minutes or ~15,600 chats)
• Extra credits: $1 per 100
• Base plan included in each tier

Each call or message consumes credits, so real usage depends on your mix of voice and chat.

6. Greetmate

Greetmate is packed with features but it’s definitely built for tech-savvy users. If you’ve used tools like Zapier, Airtable, or Make, you’ll probably feel right at home with the drag-and-drop workflow builder. If not, expect a learning curve.

Onboarding is extensive. Every step includes a video tutorial from the founder, which some users will appreciate, but others might find overwhelming. Personally, I found it a bit much when I just wanted to get in and test the basics. That said, if you take the time to watch the videos and explore the UI, you’ll uncover a ton of power.

The Copilot-style tool is a helpful shortcut—it lets you type a prompt to generate a full flow—but don’t expect perfection. You’ll still need to tweak things manually.

What really stood out to me was the warm transfer feature. When the AI forwards a call, it gives the person on the other end a quick summary of what the caller wants and asks if they’d like to accept the call. Not every tool has this, and it’s a nice touch that mimics the experience of a real receptionist. Greetmate also supports outbound calling.

The biggest downside is the interface. Navigating between agents, workflows, knowledge bases, and individual skills felt clunky. It took me a while to get the hang of where everything lived.

Greetmate pros:

• Built for power users who want full control over call flows
• Thorough onboarding with video tutorials
• Warm transfers with call summaries before hand-off
• Outbound calling and GPT-powered flow generation
• Google Calendar scheduling, webhooks, and sub-accounts

Greetmate cons:

• Interface is difficult to navigate
• Not ideal for beginners or folks in a hurry
• Copilot-generated flows still require manual editing
  

Standout feature

Warm transfers. When a call is routed to you or a team member, the AI doesn’t just pass it through—it announces who’s calling and why, and gives you the chance to accept or decline.

Greetmate pricing

Greetmate is priced based on minutes and feature access:

• Business: $99/month – includes 300 minutes, up to 5 workflows, 3 concurrent calls, and no outbound calling. Additional minutes: $0.18 each.
• Business Pro: $299/month – includes 800 minutes, outbound calling, 15 workflows, GPT flow prompts, and up to 3 sub-accounts.
  

Each plan includes a 21-day free trial and a 30-day money-back guarantee once you go live with your receptionist.

7. Answering.ai

Answering.ai gets the basics right with a clean, simple interface and one of the better onboarding experiences I tested. The layout is easy to navigate, and you’re given a clear starting point: just drop in a prompt to define how your AI receptionist should behave.

If you’re comfortable writing prompts, you’ll appreciate the flexibility. You can type something like:

“You are a customer service representative for [business name]. You specialize in helping customers with technical support and product inquiries.”
and it’ll follow that instruction. That said, I personally preferred platforms that didn’t make me start from scratch every time.

Some parts of the experience felt a little undercooked. For instance, you can choose from five voices for your agent—but you can’t preview them without making a test call. And while the service supports call forwarding and has a nice click-to-call button for websites, it doesn’t currently support texting.

Answering.ai pros:

• Simple UI and easy to navigate
• Clear prompt interface to define agent behavior
• Website widget with click-to-call functionality
• Supports call forwarding
  

Answering.ai cons:

• No SMS support
• Can’t preview agent voice without doing a test call
• Requires prompt writing to configure behavior
• Pricing is split between minutes and phone number fees
  

Standout feature

The embedded click-to-call widget stands out. It’s easy to set up, and gives customers a low-friction way to get in touch directly from your website—something most other platforms didn’t offer natively.

Answering.ai pricing

• 500 minutes/month: $99
• 1,500 minutes/month: $297
• Phone numbers: $2.60/month billed separately
• No texting included
  

The pricing model is simple in theory, but separating phone numbers from usage made things feel slightly more fragmented during setup.

8. Breezy.ai

Out of all the services I tested, Breezy.ai was one of the easiest to set up—second only to Upfirst. It skips the complexity of drag-and-drop builders and instead lets you create “conversation flows” using simple, natural language. You just type instructions like:

“When they want to fix the AC not turning, ask if they’ve checked the circuit breaker.”

The onboarding also stood out. Breezy made it incredibly easy to forward calls from my existing phone number—no hunting around for settings or documentation. They just gave me a number to dial.

Other nice touches: the Google Calendar integration took just a few clicks, and the system automatically reviewed past calls to suggest frequently asked questions to add to the knowledge base. That saved me time and helped make my agent smarter, faster.

But the biggest win? Two-way texting. Breezy makes it easy to text back and forth with customers, right from the platform—which is surprisingly rare among AI answering services.

Breezy.ai pros:

• Super simple to set up (no drag-and-drop builder required)
• Easy call forwarding setup
• Native Google Calendar integration
• Suggests FAQs based on past calls
• Supports two-way SMS conversations
  

Breezy.ai cons:

• Less customization than more technical platforms
• Voice quality was good but not best-in-class
  

Standout feature

Two-way texting. Most platforms only support outbound texts. Breezy lets you have full conversations via SMS—great for scheduling, rescheduling, or following up with customers.

Breezy.ai pricing

• $50/month flat rate
• Includes unlimited inbound/outbound calls and SMS

Which AI answering service is right for your business?

Every small business has different needs when it comes to answering the phone. Some just want to stop missing calls. Others want a full-fledged virtual receptionist that can qualify leads, schedule appointments, and send follow-ups.

Here are a few questions to help you decide which tool fits best:

Do you want something easy to set up, with no technical fuss?
If you’re not techy and just want something that works out of the box, check out Upfirst or Breezy.ai. Both are fast to set up and don’t require messing with flows or writing prompts.

Are you more of a power user who wants full control?
If you’re comfortable with flow builders or tweaking advanced settings, Phonely and Greetmate offer deep customization and more control over your call workflows.

Need texting or calendar integrations?
Texting isn’t a given—many tools don’t support it. Breezy.ai offers full two-way SMS, while My AI Front Desk and Upfirst both support Google Calendar for appointment setting.

Want a more conversational way to train your agent?
If you like the idea of typing a prompt to customize your receptionist, Echowin and Answering.ai are worth exploring. They let you configure your agent in plain English, no builder required.

At the end of the day, the best AI answering service is the one that works the way you work—whether that’s plug-and-play simplicity or advanced control. Once you’ve found the right fit, most of these tools can connect to your CRM, calendar, or help desk using integrations like Zapier, so your calls and follow-ups happen automatically.

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