An AI IVR is a lightweight AI voice assistant that screens callers, answers common questions, and transfers them to the right human. The simpler sibling of Smart Assistants: you pick the extension, voice, and transfer rules, and the system supplies the greeting and behavior from defaults.
Overview
An AI IVR is the same underlying entity as a Smart Assistant, run in transfer-lite mode: you fill in a handful of fields and the system supplies the greeting, prompt, silence handling, and lifecycle rules.
Use an AI IVR to deflect common questions before they reach a person, or to triage callers into the right department by what they say. Use a full Smart Assistant when the AI needs to complete a task itself, when you want a custom prompt, or when the conversation is genuinely back-and-forth.
What it does
When a call reaches the extension, the AI answers immediately, speaks the default greeting, and converses until it identifies what the caller needs. It then fires the matching transfer template, or ends the call politely if nothing matches. Configure a default transfer template if you never want that outcome. The transcript and the matched transfer are logged for audit.
The Published toggle is the master on/off. When off, calls fall through as if the AI is not there. Publishing takes a few seconds to take effect.
See also
- Smart Assistants - the full-featured AI assistant for richer conversations.
- Smart assistant transfer templates - the templates that decide when and where to transfer.
- Extensions - the internal number an AI IVR answers at.
- Call flows - the AI Assistant step type routes calls to an AI IVR.