If you are weighing up Call Catcher, you should know exactly what they do before you decide, so here it is straight. A New Zealand tool that texts your customer back automatically when you miss their call, then gives you accept, decline and call-back buttons on your phone.
Talkify is the bigger machine sitting behind the same job: built in Christchurch by a studio twelve years deep in phone systems and integrations, running on a New Zealand line we sell you ourselves, connected to the software you already use, with your call recordings held in this country. Reception is one of nine things it does.
A sole trader who is comfortable ringing people back and wants the cheapest possible way to stop a missed call turning into a lost job. If nobody is ever going to answer the phone live anyway, a fast text back beats silence, and it is a simpler thing to buy and run. Credit where it is due: they are blunt that they do no voice answering at all, they publish their per-message overage rate, and their own comparison page lists the cases where a voice agent suits you better. That is more honest than most of this market manages.
We would rather you bought the right thing than bought from us. If the paragraph above describes your situation, go and talk to them.
Not gotchas, and not accusations. These are the three things about this kind of product that cost people money when they find out late. Ask us the same sort of questions.
Whether a text back is enough for the callers you actually get. Their plans are counted in messages rather than minutes, so the question is what proportion of your callers will text back at all. Older customers and genuinely urgent jobs are the two groups that usually will not.
What happens to the caller who never replies. A text-back tool recovers the ones who engage with it, and the rest are still a missed call that nobody had a conversation with.
Whether you are still the one ringing everybody back. That is the work an answering agent removes and a text-back tool, by design, does not.
These are different products rather than competing ones, and their own page says so, which we respect. The one thing worth adding is that a cheaper monthly on an SMS tool and a dearer monthly on a live voice agent are not really the same purchase being compared. A text back tells your customer you exist. An agent has the conversation, works out what the job is, decides whether it is urgent, and books it while they are still on the line. Talkify texts as well, so you get the follow-up either way.
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.
Cost is deliberately not on this page. It lives on the comparison table, with a checked date against it, so there is one place to keep honest instead of twelve. See the rest of the market on alternatives.
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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