New Zealand went from almost no AI phone answering to a crowded market in about eighteen months, and most of it looks identical from the outside. It is not. Below is every provider we know of, what each one genuinely sells, who it suits, and the questions worth asking all of us, including us.
Six things about Talkify that are hard to see on a demo call and matter enormously by month three. Each one is something you can check rather than something we can claim.
Talkify has answered New Zealand business calls since 2024. The studio behind it, D3V Services Limited in Christchurch, has been building software for over twelve years with a team of developers on staff, and was doing voice, telephony and phone system integration work before Talkify had a name. Large systems, real integrations, other people's phone infrastructure. Most of this market arrived in the last eighteen months. That is not a criticism, everyone starts somewhere, but when you are handing over your phone number it is worth knowing which one you are dealing with.
We hold a direct commercial relationship with the New Zealand carrier our numbers ride on, so numbers are provisioned on our own account and the routing is ours to change. It also means we sell you the line: a real New Zealand business phone service, hosted here, with local numbers, seats for your team, published per-minute rates and the agent already sitting on it. One number, one bill, nobody to blame in the middle. Most AI receptionists are a layer of software sitting on top of a phone account somebody else sold you, which is invisible on a good day and is the whole game on a bad one. When something breaks at three in the morning, that is the difference between us fixing it and us logging a ticket with whoever can.
Every system we name has a connector we wrote and can point you at in code. Calendars, CRMs, accounting, job management, gym and workshop and salon software, plus a documented REST API, webhooks and Zapier for whatever we have not built yet. We keep a hard internal rule that nothing gets named on this website until the connector behind it exists, which is why our integration list is shorter than some and why every name on it is real.
Support is 0800 002 967, in New Zealand, in your timezone. You are not going through a chat widget to reach a partner agency, and you are not waiting overnight for a reply from a different hemisphere. The people who answer are the people who wrote the thing, which is the practical advantage of buying from a studio rather than a sales funnel.
It is the one thing competitors get wrong about us, and it is worth correcting plainly. Reception is a single product on this platform. The same account also runs outgoing call campaigns, phone surveys with per-person analysis, overdue invoice chasing driven from your own Xero, daily wellness check calls, an on-call roster that escalates until a human actually accepts, a front counter agent, a website chat widget that talks as well as types, SMS follow-ups that catch what the call missed, a documented REST API with webhooks, and the business phone line underneath all of it. Compare a single inbound answering product against Talkify and you are comparing it against one row of the sheet.
Standing up an AI phone agent is genuinely easy now. A weekend, a voice API and a landing page will get you something that answers and sounds impressive on a demo call. The hard part starts afterwards: the caller with a thick accent and a bad line, the number that has to move providers without dropping a call, the booking that must land in the software you actually run, the 2am failure that needs a person who understands SIP rather than a person who understands prompts. That is the part that takes years, and it is the part we spent them on.
Before writing any of this we read the public pricing, feature and about pages of fourteen providers selling AI phone answering into New Zealand, ourselves included in the count. These three things stood out, and none of them are about features. Checked August 2026.
We looked at fourteen providers selling AI phone answering into New Zealand and exactly one states a founding year in plain sight on its own website. One more carries a founding date buried in page code where no customer will ever see it. The rest say nothing, and several fall back on a copyright line, two of which are already a year out of date. In a purchase that is almost entirely about trust, that is a strange thing for a market to be quiet about.
Not one other provider in that sweep states that your call recordings and transcripts are held in New Zealand. Several publish something that reads like it at a glance: New Zealand owned and operated, compliant with the Privacy Act, stored on secure cloud servers. Those are claims about ownership, law and encryption, not about which country the audio sits in. Two publish an offshore location outright. They may all be fine. The point is that you cannot tell, and those recordings are your customers' personal information, which makes them your responsibility under the Privacy Act rather than your supplier's.
Roughly half publish a per-minute rate for the calls past whatever the plan includes, and the rest do not, which means you cannot model your own call volume before signing. Three publish no usable price at all: one has empty plan cards under a from-price, one shows a placeholder where the number should be, and one quotes on application only. Credit where it is due, one provider states plainly that it has no overage rate at all, which is a better answer than silence.
We are not going to pretend this is a neutral survey, we sell one of the fourteen. It is a count of what providers publish on their own websites, and you can check every one of them yourself in an afternoon. Where a provider does not publish something, that is all we are saying: not that they do it badly, but that you cannot find out before you sign.
The most useful thing we can tell you is that these are not all the same product. A missed-call text-back tool, an auto-attendant that routes calls, a consultancy build and an answering agent are four different purchases, and a lot of buyers only discover which one they bought afterwards. Pick the category first, then the provider.
Every provider above answers a phone and writes the booking into somebody else's software. We make that software too. Mahi Time is our booking platform, built in Aotearoa by the same team, for salons, barbers, beauty therapists and service businesses: a multi staff, multi location and multi resource calendar with conflict detection and two way sync to Google and Microsoft, your own branded booking page, deposits and automatic no show fees, unlimited email and SMS reminders, payments through Stripe or Windcave, staff hours and timesheets, and a live feed into Xero. Zero commission, ever, on a flat monthly fee with the price published, because a marketplace taking a slice of every new client is not a booking system, it is a toll gate.
So when we say we understand what happens after the phone is answered, that is why. One team builds the agent, the phone line and the diary it books into. If you already run something else, that is completely fine, we integrate with it and always have.
Positioning only on this page. For what each provider costs at a real call volume, with setup fees, platform fees, GST and overage rates included, see the cost comparison, which carries a checked date and gets corrected when things change. One category nobody else on this list is in: we also sell the business phone line itself. Run a provider we have missed, or think we have described yours wrongly? Email [email protected].
Talkify gets filed as an AI receptionist, which is fair enough, we sell one. But the phone is a bigger problem than answering it, and the rest of the platform is where most of our customers end up. Every row below runs on the same account, the same number and the same bill. Most of this market sells the first row and stops.
| Talkify | Easy AI Agents | reception.ai | KiwiAgent | Waboom | |
|---|---|---|---|---|---|
| Answers inbound calls | ✓ | ✓ | ✓ | ✓ | ✓ |
| Outbound calling campaigns | ✓ Win-backs, reminders, follow-ups | – | – | – | ✓ |
| Phone surveys with reporting | ✓ Question sets, live results | – | – | – | – |
| Chases overdue invoices | ✓ Driven from your own Xero | – | – | – | – |
| Website chat on the same brain | ✓ $49/mo, voice + text | – | • Separate web chat minutes | – | – |
| Multi-line call centre | ✓ 5, 10 or 15 lines | • Up to 10 at once | • 1 call at once on entry plan | ✓ Unlimited concurrent | ✓ Unlimited |
| Personal assistant for one mobile | ✓ Shortwave, from $89/mo | – | – | – | – |
| iOS and Android apps | ✓ Both, every plan | – | – | – | – |
A dash means the provider does not publish that service on their own website, not that they refuse to do it. Taken from each provider's public pages in August 2026. Waboom, CallKyzen, Automate AI and EnvokeAI all publish outbound calling; AI for Trades states it is inbound only. Spotted something out of date? Email [email protected] and we will correct it.
Nine of the questions we hear most. If yours isn't here, ring our live demo agent on 03 242 1262, it'll either answer or queue a callback from a human.
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