How to set up an AI voice assistant for your business

Putting a voice assistant on your line is not an IT project. It is a series of short decisions, only two of which take real effort, plus one thing to do on your phone. The rest is settled by answering questions about your business.

This article gives the sequence in the order it actually unfolds, and says at each step whether it will take you ten minutes or an evening. It promises no total duration: that depends entirely on the state your information is in on the day you start.

What gets decided before you connect anything

1. 1
   Decide what the assistant should handle

   Take last week's calls and sort them into three piles: the simple questions, the appointments, and the rest. The first two piles are the starting scope. The third is what gets transferred to you. This list fits on one sheet of paper, and it is the most useful document of the whole setup.

2. 2
   Gather the information that will serve as answers

   Real opening hours, including the lunch break and the closures. Address and access. Services, with the prices you are willing to give over the phone. Usual lead times. And above all: what you do not do, which avoids the appointments you would have to cancel. This is the long step, and it has its own section below.

3. 3
   Choose the voice and the languages

   A ten-minute decision, made by listening rather than by reading a spec sheet. Listen to each voice say your company name: it is the first thing the caller will hear. For the languages, take the ones you already speak at the counter, plus English if you get passing trade.

The step that really takes time

The second step is the one that stalls setups, and it has nothing to do with technology. Almost nobody has their information gathered anywhere. The summer hours are written down nowhere, two prices have changed without the website following, and the question that comes up ten times a week has never been put in writing.

According to localsearch, a Swisscom subsidiary selling digital services to SMEs, its KMU Digital Pulse 2025 analysed 47,079 Swiss SME websites: 36% of Swiss SMBs have their own site and, among those, 7% have a professional booking tool, which is 3% of all Swiss SMBs. In other words, for two businesses out of three there is no page to go and fetch that information from. It has to be written.

It is also what the Confederation's SME portal says when it asks a specialist what really holds SMBs back:

Translated from the French: “One of the big challenges is the speed at which AI is moving. SMBs generally lack the time to keep up and to assess properly what AI can do for their business.”

What blocks it is lack of time, not lack of skill. Here is how to get round it:

• Start from your website, even an incomplete one. An assistant can be built from what already exists, then corrected. Starting from a blank page is what makes people give up.
• Write down the ten questions you are actually asked. Not the twenty you could be asked. Ten questions and ten answers cover most of what rings, and the rest fills in as you read the calls of the first few weeks.

Calendar, transfer, data

1. 1
   Connect your calendar

   Keep the one you already use. What matters is not the connection, it is what you declare in it: the duration per appointment type, the slots genuinely open for booking, the minimum notice before an appointment, and the periods you keep for yourself. A badly bounded calendar produces appointments you will move by hand, which cancels out the benefit.

2. 2
   Set the transfer rule, and the number

   You have to decide in which cases to transfer, and to which number. The classic cases are an emergency, a complaint, irritation, and an explicit request to speak to someone. The number has to be a line where someone genuinely picks up at that moment, otherwise the transfer only moves the missed call somewhere else.

3. 3
   Decide what happens to the recording, and for how long

   To be decided once and for all: do you keep the audio or only the transcript, how many days do you keep the calls, and who in your business may read them. In Switzerland, recording a call without saying so is a criminal offence and the business exception is narrower than it is usually described. The detail, with the statutory articles, is in our article on data protection.

Call forwarding on your line

This is the only technical operation in the whole setup, and it is done from your phone. You keep your number: nothing changes on your business cards, your website or your Google listing. A forward sends calls to the assistant's number, exactly as you would send them to a colleague.

Swiss operators offer three forwards, and choosing between them is an organisational decision, not a setting.

The most common setting is to combine busy and no answer: you carry on answering when you are available, and nothing falls into the void any more. Unconditional forwarding makes sense for a dedicated reception line, or during the holidays. Either way, it is switched off as quickly as it is switched on. The exact codes depend on your operator and on the type of line: they are in the account's setup wizard, rather than here where they would age badly.

Test, then go live

1. 1
   Call from a real mobile, not from a browser

   An online demo tests the conversation, not your installation. Call the number from your own phone, in the conditions your customers call in: in the car, in the workshop, with noise. Test the cases that matter, a complete appointment booking, a question you know the answer to, and a request to speak to someone so you can check the transfer. Transfer can only be checked on a real line: it does not work in a browser.

2. 2
   Have someone who does not know the script test it

   You will ask your questions the way you wrote them. Someone close to you, or a colleague, will ask them the wrong way round, with hesitations and half-finished sentences, which is exactly what a real caller does. That is the test that finds the gaps.

3. 3
   Switch the forwarding on, starting with no answer

   There is no reason to move every call across on day one. By starting with the calls nobody answers, you risk nothing: those calls were lost anyway. You will widen it once you have read a few dozen summaries.

4. 4
   Read the first week of summaries

   Not in real time, once a day is enough. You are looking for three things: a question the assistant could not answer, a piece of information that is wrong or out of date, and a call that should have been transferred and was not. Fix those three, and you will have done most of the tuning.

What to measure in the first month

Four figures are enough.

• The calls taken outside your hours. This is the most honest measure, because those calls simply did not exist before. The human competition gives the scale: Telib, a Swiss phone answering service, publishes Monday to Friday, 8am to 7pm, about 55 of the 168 hours a week holds.
• The appointments booked by the assistant. The figure that converts into francs most directly, and the one to compare with your usual average rather than with zero.
• The transfer rate. If it is very high, your scope is too narrow or your information is incomplete. If it is zero, be suspicious: that often means calls which should have been escalated were not.
• The minutes used. They determine which plan you need. Ours are on the pricing page: CHF 99, 299 or 599 a month, excl. VAT, for 500, 1,500 or 3,000 minutes. The first month is exactly what tells you which, and our article on pricing sets out what a minute covers.

To place what you should expect from it: the AXA study on the SME labour market 2025, picked up by the Confederation's SME portal, notes that 34% of Swiss SMBs deliberately use AI, that 57% of them see a gain in time, and that only 2% have cut staff. The expected outcome is time given back, not a job removed.

And if it does not suit you

Call forwarding is switched off from your phone in a few seconds, and your line goes back to what it was. That is why this setup can be attempted without much risk: nothing in the list above is irreversible, and you have neither changed your number nor touched your calendar.

To go further, our guide to AI phone answering takes these steps in detail, and the sector pages show what the result looks like depending on the trade, for example at tradespeople or in a medical practice, where the starting scope is not the same at all. Finally, Switzerland has 561,952 businesses with fewer than ten people, or 89.7% of all market economy businesses, according to the FSO: if setting this up required an IT department, it would concern almost nobody.