Now you can route select calls to a professional human receptionist with Live Agent Call Routing. This gives you more control over how your calls are handled while maintaining the screening efficiency and affordability of AI Receptionist.
Live Agent Call Routing is currently in beta to allow for continued testing and optimization. We welcome your feedback!
How it works
Live Agent Call Routing can be enabled for your choice of the two primary caller types: Potential new clients & customers or Existing clients & customers. Once enabled:
- AI Receptionist will continue to answer every call.
- For each inbound call, AI Receptionist will quickly identify the caller type.
- Qualified callers will be routed directly to a human receptionist, based on your settings.
- One of our professional Virtual Receptionists will handle the entire call according to your call instructions.
Once AI Receptionist identifies the caller type:
- AI Receptionist will let the caller know they’re being transferred:
"Let me connect you with a human receptionist who can help you from here."
- The call is immediately routed to one of Smith.ai's human Virtual Receptionists to complete the conversation.
When a call is routed to a human receptionist:
- They’ll greet the caller and lead the conversation from start to finish.
- There’s no back-and-forth between AI and humans — just one smooth handoff.
When viewing your call summaries, the call details page will now reflect how your calls were handled, whether by AI Receptionist or a human receptionist.
- The "Handled by" section will read:
- “AI Receptionist” for standard AI Receptionist-led calls
- “Human Receptionist” for human-led calls
How to enable Live Agent Call Routing for potential new clients or existing clients
Step 1: Navigate to the Instructions tab from the lefthand navigation menu of your AI Receptionist dashboard.
Step 2: Click Configure to open the call instructions for the caller type you want to adjust: either Potential new clients & customers or Existing clients & customers.

Step 3: In the call instructions, under "Who should talk to this type of caller?", select Human Receptionist, then scroll down to the bottom of the modal and click Save to apply your changes.
On the main Instructions page, you will then see a "Human handles the call" badge to indicate that the selected caller type will be escalated to a live agent:
Questions? Contact us!
- If you're already a Smith.ai client and need help, please email us at support@smith.ai or call us at (650) 727-6484 for assistance.
- If you're not yet a Smith.ai client, please schedule a free consultation to get started with our AI Receptionist or email us at sales@smith.ai. We'll help you select the best plan to match your business’s growth goals and budget.
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