A voice assistant that answers the phone and sends a text mid-call

Situation

Service businesses answer the phone between one job and the next. When nobody can pick up, the client calls the next company on the list.

Problem

A missed call is a lost enquiry. Calling back blind starts with questions the client could have answered earlier. Voicemail collects nothing, and a person cannot answer every call.

What I built

1. A voice assistant on ElevenLabs, connected to a real phone number. It has an instruction set written in Polish, tools in n8n and a test suite that checks every change to those instructions.

How it works

1. Someone calls the number. Ola answers right away, introduces herself and asks how she can help.
2. She asks for what you need to know before calling back: who is speaking, from which company, what eats their time. One question at a time.
3. When the caller gives a company name, she checks it online in the background and asks one question to confirm she understood it. A fact she finds is always put as a question, never as certainty.
4. When the caller gives a time to be contacted, she calls a tool. It goes to n8n, and n8n sends a confirmation text to the number the caller is dialing from. The text goes out at most once per call, only to a Polish mobile number, with a daily limit.
5. What she does not know, such as a price or a delivery date, she does not guess. She says I will settle it after the call. Asked whether she is human, she answers right away that she is an AI assistant.

Listen to a real call

This is a test call from 30 September, recorded by ElevenLabs. I call from my own phone and play a client who wants to book a conversation. During the call Ola sends me a text. It is not a client's call, it is my test.

What already works

• Ola answers a real phone number: calls from a mobile phone go through a SIP gateway to the assistant.
• The confirmation text arrives during the call. I checked it with my own phone on 30 September, the recording is above.
• Response delay: in a test phone call on 30 September (18 replies) the median was about 1.7 s from the end of my sentence to her voice. Before, it was about 4.4 s.
• Changes to the instructions are checked by a test suite: seven conversation scenarios (among them a troll caller, an attempt to impersonate the owner, a question about price) and seven assertions computed from the transcript, for example no invented numbers and always the formal form of address.
• Checking the caller's company in the background has passed a test on real audio. It has not yet come up in a client call.

What next

• A first client whose phone Ola answers. Only then will there be before and after numbers.
• Booking times in a calendar and a text reminder the day before the meeting.
• Recognizing people who call again.
• Handing an urgent call over to me.