Glossary
AI receptionist glossary
Short, plain-English definitions of the words that come up when you start looking at call answering for a trade business.
Terms explained
AI receptionist
An AI receptionist is software that answers your business phone, holds a natural conversation with the caller, captures the details of their enquiry and passes them to you as a written summary. It works around the clock and does not need to be employed, trained or covered for holiday.
Call qualification
Call qualification is the process of establishing whether an enquiry is worth your time before you call back: what the job is, where it is, how urgent it is, and whether it fits the work you do.
Lead card
A lead card is a single summary of one enquiry — caller name, phone number, job type, location, urgency and next action — presented so you can act on it in one tap rather than reading through a transcript.
Call summary
A call summary is a short written account of what was said on a call, generated automatically straight after it ends, so you can catch up in seconds instead of listening to a recording.
Call transcript
A call transcript is the full word-for-word text of a phone conversation. It is useful when a caller gave a detail — an access code, a boiler model, a landlord's name — that the summary did not need to include.
Call divert
A call divert is a setting on your mobile or landline that sends unanswered calls somewhere else. Diverting on no-answer and on busy is how you send missed calls to an AI receptionist without changing your number.
Missed call
A missed call is any inbound call you do not answer. For a trade business it is the single most common way work is lost, because most callers move to the next name on the list rather than leaving a message.
Speed to lead
Speed to lead is how long it takes you to respond to a new enquiry. Response time is one of the strongest predictors of whether you win the job, because the first credible reply usually gets the work.
SIP trunk
A SIP trunk is the internet connection that carries phone calls between a phone network and a piece of software. It is the plumbing that lets an AI receptionist answer a normal phone number.
Virtual receptionist
A virtual receptionist is a remote human who answers calls for your business, usually from a call centre and usually charged by call or by minute.
Answering service
An answering service takes messages from callers when you are unavailable and passes them on by text or email. It rarely qualifies the enquiry or books anything.
Voicemail-to-text
Voicemail-to-text converts a recorded voicemail message into written text. It only helps with callers who leave a message, which for trade enquiries is a minority.