AppBespoke · Glasgow
Your phone, answered.
Every call picked up in two rings, day or night. It books, it takes messages, and it puts real people through. Fixed price, live in three weeks.
Builds from $6,000 · Managed from $600/month
Northgate Dental, this is the practice assistant — I’m an AI, and I can book you in or put you through. How can I help?
0:02I need a check-up, something Tuesday afternoon if you have it.
0:09Tuesday at 2:30 with Dr Ellis is free. Can I take your name?
0:14Also, will my insurance cover the whitening?
0:31I can’t answer that one — I’m not given anything on insurance. Let me put you through to Rachel, she has your booking in front of her.
0:35It never guesses, and it never traps anyone.
What people ask before they book a call
- How long?
- Three weeks from kickoff.
- What if it can’t help?
- It says so and puts them through to a person, with the call notes already written up.
- What does it cost to run?
- A flat monthly plus the minutes. Both on this page, no surprises.
What you actually get
Every build, both tiers. Nothing on this list is an add-on and nothing on it is a phase two.
Answers in two rings, always
Never engaged, never closed, no hold music. Every call at 2am and every call during the Saturday rush, picked up the same way.
Books straight into your calendar
Real availability from your calendar, not a promise that somebody will ring back. The slot is gone from your diary before the caller hangs up.
Puts people through when it should
A warm transfer with the notes already attached, so the caller does not start again. This is the part that decides whether it is worth having.
Every call transcribed and searchable
Read what it actually said rather than hope. Every call, searchable, with the recording alongside it.
Your greeting, your voice, your rules
Your greeting, your tone, your rules — including the list of things it must never attempt, agreed in week one and enforced.
Reports what callers actually ask
What people ring about, what it could not handle, and what to fix. The list tells you what your phone has been costing you.
Three weeks, and you know what happens in each one
- Scope documentday 5
It handles
- Book, move and cancel appointments
- Opening hours, directions, parking
- Take a message out of hours
It never attempts
- Quote a price
- Insurance cover
- Anything clinical
Week 1
Calls and scoping
I listen to how your phone is answered now — what people ring about, what gets booked, what gets taken as a message, and what must always reach a human. We agree what it handles and, more usefully, what it must never attempt.
- Strong accentBad lineTalks over itMumblesNoisy roomTwo at onceAsks for a personRings offChanges the dateSpells a name
Week 2
Build and tune
It gets built and tuned against recordings of your real callers, accents and bad lines included. You get a number to ring partway through and can try to break it yourself, which is the fastest way to find what it should be transferring.
- Main lineLive09:31Booked09:12TransferredOut of hoursLive02:14Message23:40BookedAnsweringSecond siteLive13:02Booked12:44Directions
Week 3
Go live and hand over
Tested against the awkward calls, pointed at your number, and handed over with the transcripts, the reporting and a walkthrough. Then it is answering, and keeping it answering is my job.
- A new customer calls
Today
Rings out at lunchtime. They ring the next place on the list.
Week four
Answered in two rings, booked, confirmed back to the caller.
- Someone calls at 9pm
Today
Voicemail, and most people would rather ring somebody else than leave one.
Week four
Answered, message taken, transcript in your inbox before you wake up.
- A caller needs a person
Today
Held, explained twice, transferred, explained a third time.
Week four
Transferred to you warmly, with the notes already written up.
Kickoff is the day I can listen to how your phone is answered now, not the day you sign. Two things are out of scope and you should know before the call: anything that has to sell rather than book, and anything where call recording carries a consent obligation I would be taking on for you — healthcare beyond appointments, and legal intake. If that is you, say so and I will tell you what would have to be true.
Pricing, in public
The build is fixed and quoted before we start. The monthly is what keeps the phone answered afterwards, and the minutes are on this page rather than in month two’s invoice.
$6,000
to build, then $600 a month to run it
- One number, one calendar
- 500 included minutes a month
- $0.35 a minute beyond the allowance
- Calendar booking and warm transfer to a human
- Live in three weeks
Business
Fixed price$10,000
fixed
to build, then $1,200 a month to run it
- Everything in Starter, up to 5 numbers
- 2,000 included minutes a month
- $0.25 a minute beyond the allowance
- CRM and systems integrations
- Monthly review call
What the monthly actually pays for
The numbers, the carrier minutes and the 500 minutes in your allowance. Speech, the model and the voice itself, plus the upgrade when any one of the three is deprecated underneath you. An alert when calls start failing rather than a report at month end, changes to what it says and does, and a person to call. It is not a retainer for standby time: it pays for something that is answering your phone.
- Telephony and minutespassed through, not buried
- Model and voice usageand the upgrade when one is deprecated
- Monitoring and changesan alert, not a month-end report
Compare it to the answering service, not to a chatbot
A human answering service — Smith.ai, Ruby, the one your competitor probably uses — runs $300–1,000 a month, and it still keeps business hours or charges you more for the ones outside them. That is the number $600 sits next to. What you are buying is not a cheaper receptionist, it is one that never has a queue and never goes home.
Looking for something under $2,500?
Honestly, use one of the DIY voice builders — they are genuinely good now, and you would be paying me to click the same buttons. This is for businesses where a missed call is a lost customer and the phone has to be right. If you try one and it does not hold up, come back.
The awkward questions
Will callers know it is not a person?
Yes, and it says so in the first sentence. It introduces itself as an assistant, and if anyone asks it confirms it plainly. Pretending is how you lose a customer: someone who works it out halfway through the call stops trusting everything it just told them, and they tell other people. Saying it up front costs you nothing — people are far more tolerant of a machine that answers immediately than of a voicemail that never rings back.
What happens when it cannot help?
It says so and transfers them, rather than improvising. The handover is warm — it stays on the line until a person picks up — and the notes are already written when they do, so the caller does not repeat themselves. Out of hours, or if nobody picks up, it takes the message and sends the transcript. What it must never attempt is agreed with you in week one and enforced, not left to the model to decide.
What if it mishears someone?
It confirms anything it is about to act on, out loud, before it acts. No booking is made without reading the name, the number and the time back to the caller and getting a yes. Spelling of names and postcodes is confirmed letter by letter. That makes some calls a few seconds longer and it is the right trade: a mis-booked appointment costs more than fifteen seconds does.
Can it handle accents?
Mostly, and not perfectly. Modern speech recognition handles a broad range of accents well, and it is noticeably weaker on strong regional accents in noise — a caller outdoors, or on a bad mobile line. That is what week two is for: it is tuned against recordings of your actual callers, not a generic test set, and where it still struggles it confirms more and transfers sooner. If your callers are mostly one accent it does not have much trouble with, you will see that in the numbers before launch rather than after.
What does the monthly actually cover?
Telephony and the included minutes, the model usage, monitoring with an alert when calls start failing, changes to what it says and does, and a person to call. Beyond the allowance it is $0.35 a minute, published because telephony has a real per-minute cost and pretending otherwise produces an argument in month two. It is not a retainer for standby time: it pays for something that is answering your phone.
Can I keep my existing number?
Yes. Either you port the number to us, or — more commonly, because it is reversible in an afternoon — you leave it where it is and forward it. Forwarding means you can point the phone back at yourselves at any moment without waiting on a carrier, which is what most people want for the first few months.
What if I want to stop?
You stop paying and it stops at the end of that month. No lock-in period, no exit fee, no notice to serve. Your number is yours, your recordings and transcripts are yours and exportable, and if the number was ported we port it back. Forwarding just gets switched off.
How is this different from a $2,000 build on Upwork?
Mostly by what happens after launch. A $2,000 build on top of one of the voice platforms is a real build and it will take calls on the day it is delivered. The difference shows up when the platform changes its pricing, or a model update makes it start talking over people, or your opening hours change and nobody remembers where the prompt lives. At that point the $2,000 build has nobody left to call, and unlike a chatbot going quiet, this one is your phone line. I am not the cheap option and I will not pretend to be: if the phone ringing out costs you nothing, buy the cheap one.
Twenty minutes, and you will know if this is worth doing
From $6,000 to build and $600 a month to run, 500 minutes included, answering three weeks after kickoff. On the call you get a fixed number or an honest reason why not — no deck, no discovery process, no follow-up sequence.