How fast is an AI receptionist? Here are our measured numbers.
Every vendor in this category says instant. This page says 1.74 seconds median, 3.37 seconds at the 90th percentile, measured on 104 turns of live phone calls on our own line, with the method published and the slow turns included. Then you can call the demo line and time us yourself.
The numbers, none excluded.
Every inbound phone call on our live demo line from August 14 to 21, 2026, measured turn by turn by the pipeline's own telemetry over the public telephone network. The clock runs from your last word to the receptionist's first.
median response gap per turn: you stop talking, it starts
90th percentile: nine of ten turns respond faster than this
of turns answered in under two seconds
turns measured across 16 live phone calls, none excluded
The fastest turn in the sample answered in 1.06 seconds; the slowest took 6.94 seconds. Both are real, and the second one is why the 90th percentile is published next to the median.
Where the 1.74 seconds goes.
Four legs run between your last word and the reply, and each is measured separately on every turn. The figures are each leg's own median, so they do not sum exactly to the turn median: legs overlap, and no turn is median at everything at once.
Hearing you out
Turning your audio into text. The median is quick, but this is the leg that blows out on noisy lines and speakerphones: its own 90th percentile is 1.73s, and it is the main reason slow turns are slow.
Deciding you finished
Detecting the end of your turn. Tuning this down makes the agent snappy but interrupty; tuning it up makes it polite but slow. It is a judgment the pipeline makes on every single turn.
Composing the reply
The language model deciding what to say, checking the service area, choosing the one triage question. The biggest single leg on a clean line.
Starting to speak
Synthesizing the reply into a voice and getting the first audio onto the wire. Speech starts while the rest of the sentence is still being generated.
The slow turns, explained instead of hidden.
A quarter of turns take longer than 2.5 seconds, and our call audits show two causes doing almost all of it. First, noisy lines: transcription's own 90th percentile is 1.73 seconds, because a speakerphone in a garage takes longer to hear out than a handset in a kitchen. Second, the mid-call save: on the turns where the receptionist writes your job to the record, name, number, address, pest, and urgency, it is doing the paperwork the call exists for while it talks. We tune both, and we publish the tail because we can afford to: a vendor that only shows you its median is telling you half the truth.
The method, in full.
Sample: every inbound phone call on our live pest control demo line from August 14 to 21, 2026, 16 calls and 104 conversational turns, over the public telephone network. No call was excluded, including the worst one. Instrument: the voice pipeline's own per-turn telemetry, which clocks each leg from the caller's last word to the receptionist's first audio. Turn medians and percentiles are computed across all 104 turns pooled. Updates to this page re-run the same measurement on a fresh window and move the date stamp; numbers never carry over unmeasured. Measured August 21, 2026.
The questions worth asking about latency.
Is 1.74 seconds fast?
It answers in well under two seconds on the median turn, on every call, at every hour, with no hold queue and no ring-out, and it is exactly as fast on call forty of a storm week as on call one. We publish the number because every vendor in this category says instant and almost none of them says a number. Call the demo line with a stopwatch and check ours.
Why publish the 90th percentile and not just the median?
Because the median hides the turns callers actually complain about. Nine of ten turns respond inside 3.37 seconds; the slowest turn in the whole sample took 6.94 seconds. Both numbers are on this page on purpose.
What makes the slow turns slow?
Two things in our audits: transcription waiting out a noisy line, and turns where the receptionist is saving the job mid-call, writing your name, address, and pest to the record while keeping the conversation going. The second one is time spent doing the work the call exists for.
What does the clock include?
Everything between your last word and the receptionist's first: transcribing what you said, deciding you had finished speaking, composing the reply, and synthesizing the voice. It is measured by the pipeline's own telemetry on live phone calls, not in a lab.
Will these numbers change?
Yes, and the page changes with them. Each update re-measures the full sample with the same fixed method and moves the date stamp. The numbers here were measured on live calls in the week ending August 21, 2026.
Keep going.
Bring a stopwatch.
The demo line is live and the numbers above are standing claims about it. Call, talk, time the gaps, and hold us to our own page.
Hear it live