Answer the 9:47 pm call without waking anyone up.

A phone that rings out after 5 pm is a lead you paid for and handed to whoever answers next. The TradesWork AI receptionist exists for those calls: the furnace that quits at 9:47 pm, the second line ringing while your CSR is mid-booking, the Saturday morning when the office is closed. It answers in your company's name, finds out what's wrong, and either books a real arrival window, takes a clean message, or puts a person on the line.

This page explains what it does on a call, the rules it can't break, how to set it up, and where it stops.

What a call actually sounds like

Say Dana calls at 9:47 pm from the number on her account. Caller ID matches her customer record, but the receptionist doesn't announce that. It asks who it's speaking with and where the service is. Dana says she's on Alder Court; the receptionist asks for the house number, she says 1418, and now she's verified. Only then can it mention her Comfort Club membership or the furnace on file.

Next comes triage. "The furnace won't come on" is not an emergency by itself, so the receptionist asks the safety question: do you smell gas, is anyone unwell? Dana says no, just cold. It checks the capacity engine for the job type, offers two or three windows, and when Dana picks tomorrow 8 to 10, it books the appointment and confirms out loud. If your texting registration is approved, she gets a confirmation text that respects STOP and quiet hours. If texting isn't set up, the receptionist doesn't promise one.

Now change one detail: Dana says her 90-year-old mother lives with her. No heat plus a vulnerable occupant is triaged as urgent. After hours, that means a warm transfer to your on-call person, who hears a whispered summary first. If nobody is on call, the receptionist books the earliest window and marks the job high priority.

The rules it can't break

Most AI answering demos rely on a well-written prompt. The problem is that a prompt is a request, not a guarantee. TradesWork puts the important rules in code that runs around the AI model, so they hold even when the model gets something wrong.

Answering modes and when to use each

The receptionist settings live under Settings › Phones › Who answers.

• After hours only: the safest start. Your team handles business hours exactly as today, and the AI covers nights and weekends.
• After hours, and when the office doesn't answer: if your office phones ring out (you set ring time from 10 to 60 seconds, default 20), the AI picks up instead of voicemail. Good for one-CSR shops where the second line is the problem.
• Every call: the AI answers first and transfers anyone who asks. Some owner-operators with no office staff use this.

Whatever the mode, there's a kill switch. Turn the receptionist off and the very next call rings the office or goes to voicemail. And if the voice service is unhealthy, TradesWork doesn't offer the AI at all; it falls back to your team, then voicemail.

Setting it up

1. 1

   Get the line on TradesWork

   Buy a local number (Twilio lists local numbers at $1.15 a month), port your existing one, or forward your current line from your carrier or VoIP system. Settings shows forwarding guides.

2. 2

   Choose job types and area

   Mark which job types the AI may book, confirm or reschedule. Office-only job types become booking requests. Enter your service-area ZIPs.

3. 3

   Set fees, transfer and on-call

   Enter an after-hours fee if you charge one, a transfer number, and on-call people for each weekday. Review the escalation triggers under Settings › Agent controls.

4. 4

   Edit the receptionist brief

   TradesWork drafts it from your company data. Add what a new CSR would need: brands you service, what you don't do, how you describe your membership.

5. 5

   Pick a voice and language

   Choose ElevenLabs, Google or Amazon voices, English, Spanish or auto. Add street names, towns and equipment brands as speech hints so names and addresses come through cleanly.

6. 6

   Practice, then switch on

   Run practice calls covering verified customers, wrong numbers, gas smells, price shoppers and hang-ups. They check real capacity but book nothing.

What happens to calls it doesn't book

Not every call should end in a booking, and the receptionist doesn't force it. Each call gets one outcome: booked, not booked with a reason (unverified caller, outside service area, price and so on), transferred, excused (wrong number, a vendor) or spam.

The useful ones are the not-booked callers who needed service. TradesWork turns those into a "Second chance" callback task, routed by your agent controls, with the caller's name, service, address and preferred times as the receptionist wrote them down. A price shopper who hung up at 10 pm becomes a call your CSR makes at 8:05 am with the context already filled in.

Every AI call also links to its transcript and summary on the calls page. If you use call scorecards, AI calls can be graded against the same scorecard as your human CSRs, which is the fastest way to find gaps in the brief.

What it costs to run

There's no per-seat fee for the receptionist. What you pay for is usage: the phone line, the voice service and the AI model. Twilio lists inbound calls on a local number at $0.0085 a minute and ConversationRelay, the speech service the receptionist runs on, at $0.07 a minute.¹ Add the AI model and our estimate is about $0.14 a minute on the faster model and about $0.20 on the most capable one.

These are estimates from list prices and change when providers change theirs. The settings page and the AI calls page show the same estimate for your configuration, labelled as an estimate.

Recording, consent and honesty with callers

The default greeting says the caller is talking to a virtual assistant and that the call is transcribed so your team can follow up. Keep that. State recording laws differ: federal law permits recording with one party's consent, while a number of states require everyone on the call to agree.² If you serve customers in an all-party consent state, use the explicit announcement option in your phone settings and get your own legal advice.

How it compares to ServiceTitan

ServiceTitan markets an AI Virtual Agent that books by job type, location and skills through its Adaptive Capacity system, recognizes members and VIPs, transfers to a live CSR, and includes outbound calls and texts to new leads.³ ServiceTitan doesn't publish pricing for its plans or add-ons.⁴

Who it's not for

If every call already gets answered by a person within three rings, day and night, you don't need this. Shops that rely on a human answering service for complex commercial dispatch may also want to keep it: TradesWork has no paid human tier behind the AI. And if your growth plan depends on outbound AI calls to new web leads, that isn't built. The lead inbox answers new leads by text instead.

For everyone else, start in after-hours mode, read every AI transcript for a week, and tighten the brief. That week tells you more than any demo.