If you are weighing up reception.ai, you should know exactly what they do before you decide, so here it is straight. An overseas AI receptionist product, capable and well documented, sold in US dollars.
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 business operating internationally, comfortable in US dollars, that does not need a New Zealand phone number or a GST invoice. The underlying voice quality is excellent and we are not going to pretend otherwise.
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 you can get a New Zealand number on it, since the documentation asks for a US area code.
How the billing works for a New Zealand company: US dollar invoices, no GST, foreign exchange and a card conversion fee.
How many calls the entry plan handles at once, and what every minute past the included allowance costs.
This is the comparison where we are most careful, because the product is good. The difference is not voice quality, it is fit for a New Zealand business: a real 09 or 03 number, an invoice your accountant can code, GST, someone in this timezone to ring, and call data that stays in the country.
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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