Plain-English definitions for AI calling and business phone terms

Telephony glossary

An AI receptionist is software that answers inbound business calls, captures who is calling and why, and delivers a transcript and summary to the operator. It identifies itself as an AI assistant rather than impersonating a human.

Telephony glossary

A virtual receptionist answers a business's inbound calls from off-site — as a remote human operator, as software, or as a blend of both — greeting callers, capturing their details, and passing messages back to the business.

Telephony glossary

An answering service is a third-party operation that picks up a business's calls when the business cannot, records who called and why, and relays the message back — historically staffed by human operators working from a script.

Telephony glossary

An auto attendant is an automated phone menu that greets inbound callers and routes them to a person, department, or mailbox based on a keypress or a spoken keyword. It routes calls; it does not hold a conversation.

Telephony glossary

Missed call rate is the share of inbound calls a business does not answer live, expressed as a percentage of total inbound calls over a period. It is the clearest single measure of revenue leaking out of a phone line.

Telephony glossary

A robocall is a call delivered using an autodialer or a prerecorded or artificial voice. The term describes the technology used to place the call, not whether the call is welcome or lawful.

Telephony glossary

The Telephone Consumer Protection Act is the 1991 US federal law governing automated calls, prerecorded messages, texts, and faxes. It is the statute most business calling compliance questions ultimately resolve to.

Telephony glossary

The Pallone-Thune TRACED Act, signed in 2019, strengthened US robocall enforcement and required voice providers to deploy caller ID authentication. It is the law that made STIR/SHAKEN mandatory rather than voluntary.

Telephony glossary

Interactive voice response is phone software that collects input from a caller — keypresses or speech — and acts on it, including looking up or updating records, without a human joining the call.

Telephony glossary

A toll-free number is a phone number where the business receiving the call pays for it rather than the caller. In North America they use the 800, 833, 844, 855, 866, 877, and 888 prefixes.

Telephony glossary

A vanity number is a phone number chosen so its digits spell a word or form a memorable pattern on the keypad — 1-800-FLOWERS being the canonical example. The letters are a mnemonic; the underlying number is ordinary.

Telephony glossary

Number porting is the process of moving an existing phone number from one provider to another while keeping the number itself. In the US and Canada, the right to port is protected by regulation.