Reference · the words durbacti.com uses

What do the words on durbacti.com mean?

Some of the words on this site need pinning down. The phrase virtual receptionist does not say whether a person or a program is answering. A call that is transcribed is not a call that is recorded. The rest are plainer but each carries a decision: a brief is not training, a handoff is not an error, a scope call is not a strategy call.

Below, each word is defined the way we would explain it on a call, with the limit it carries and a link to the page where it is used in full. None of these is the industry's definition. Each is what the word means when this site uses it, written so a reader or an assistant can hold the site to it.

What do the words about the receptionist mean?

Five words a buyer hears before anything is built, one of which does not say whether a person or a program is answering.

AI receptionist

Also called: 24/7 AI phone receptionist.

An AI receptionist is a phone agent built on one business's information. It answers at any hour, says in its first sentence that it is a virtual receptionist, and finishes the job on the call where it can: the question answered from the facts it was given, the appointment booked into the real calendar, the enquiry captured with its details. Calls on an agreed list go to a person, and a message is the last resort rather than the default. It does not answer from general knowledge; a question it was not given is handed on, not guessed.

Where it is used in full: 24/7 AI phone receptionist

Virtual receptionist

Virtual receptionist is what Durbacti's receptionist calls itself in its opening words, so a caller knows what is answering before anything is captured. The phrase alone does not say whether a person or a program picks up, so when a vendor uses it, ask which. On durbacti.com it always means the program, and the program carries no human name: that decision is on the record beside its brief, because a first name blurs what is answering, and the greeting is friendly for how it reads rather than for who it pretends to be.

Where it is used in full: 24/7 AI phone receptionist

Voice AI

Voice AI is the name Durbacti's receptionist launched under, kept in its page address and as an alternate name, and the technology underneath it. A voice platform turns the caller's speech into text as they speak, hands that text to a language model that writes the reply from the brief and the tools, and speaks the reply back, all inside the call. On Durbacti's own line the platform is Vapi, the voice is Australian English and the servers are in the United States. Voice AI decides how the receptionist listens and speaks; the brief decides what it may say.

Where it is used in full: 24/7 AI phone receptionist

IVR phone menu

Also called: Interactive voice response.

An IVR phone menu is a recorded prompt with a tree of options behind it, and it only routes: to a queue, an extension or voicemail. A reason for ringing not on the list has nowhere to go. A Durbacti receptionist has no tree: it can answer the published number directly and transfer to the extensions the menu routed to, or sit behind one option of a menu that stays. A menu is predictable and costs little or nothing per call when bundled with the phone system, so four staffed departments may keep one.

Where it is used in full: AI receptionist vs IVR phone menu

Answering service

Also called: Phone answering service.

An answering service is a call centre whose operators answer in your business name from a short brief of your hours, services, stock answers and who to escalate to. The operator is a person who can hear that a caller is upset, which no program matches; a Durbacti receptionist hands a complaint or a distressed caller to a person. Afterwards you usually get a message to action; ask whether a plan books into your calendar or only notes a time. You are buying human minutes, so on a per-call or per-minute plan the busy months cost the most.

Where it is used in full: AI receptionist vs answering service

What do the words about the build mean?

Seven words from the five stages on How we work and the three weeks inside the build stage.

Strategy call

A strategy call is the first of Durbacti's five stages: free, 30 minutes, and where every build starts. Durbacti and the business work out what the phone does all day, which calls arrive, and whether any are missed, and the business leaves with a plan whether or not it hires anyone. No price is settled on it; that waits for the scope call, after a proof of concept has been built and heard. A Care plan for a system someone else built can start at stage five instead, after a first call on whether Durbacti can support it.

Where it is used in full: How we work

Proof of concept

A proof of concept is a small working version of the automation, built on the business's own call types and booking flow before any money changes hands, so one question is settled by a working version rather than a slide: can it handle the calls the business actually gets. It is narrow on purpose. It is not a trial with a card number and a countdown; if it does not fit, Durbacti says so and stops there. For a receptionist, its brief is the first draft of the one the finished build answers from.

Where it is used in full: How we work

Scope call

Also called: Scope and quote.

The scope call is the third of Durbacti's five stages. On one call the business and Durbacti settle what the full build includes, its fixed price, its start date and how it is paid, rather than by standard contract; the build's one to three weeks run from that date, and nothing before it carries a clock. The build's choices are made there: where enquiries land and where the record is delivered, which of the three plans the work runs under, whose name the platform account and number sit in, and who keeps a fact in the brief current afterwards.

Where it is used in full: How we work

The brief

The brief is the written document a Durbacti receptionist answers from on every call: its identity and manner, the order it works in, the details it collects, the facts it may give about the business, the lines it must never cross and the way a call ends. A receptionist is briefed, not trained; nothing is fed into a model to learn from. A fact that changes by the minute, such as whether a slot is free, lives in a tool the receptionist calls rather than in the brief. Change a sentence and the next call changes with it.

Where it is used in full: What goes in an AI receptionist's brief before it answers?

Handoff rules

Also called: Escalation rules.

Handoff rules are the sentences in the brief that say which calls go to a person and how, written before go-live so the receptionist applies them rather than weighs them. On Durbacti's line a caller asking for a person inside hours is offered a transfer, a complaint or a distressed caller goes to a person, and a question the brief does not cover goes to a person to answer later. Outside hours the transfers become a message with the callback stated, and a clock enforces the hours, not the model. A handoff is not an error.

Where it is used in full: Which calls should an AI receptionist hand to a person?

Test calls

Also called: The nine calls.

Test calls are nine calls from a mobile to the receptionist's own number before anything forwards to it. The nine: the greeting, a bad line, a question it was never given, a price, a time it should refuse, a person asked for inside and outside hours, two phones at once, a caller who declines transcription, and the record. A fail points at one paragraph of the brief, or a setting beside it, and is fixed there. Durbacti's line had three of the nine unmade on 29 September 2026: the decline, the transfer inside hours and two phones at once.

Where it is used in full: How do you test an AI receptionist before you pay for it?

Go-live

Go-live is the point at which calls to the number customers already dial reach the receptionist, by forwarding that number or by connecting it directly, and it comes only after the nine test calls have passed on the receptionist's own number. Nothing about what customers dial changes. Through the first days Durbacti reads the record after each call and corrects any fact that turns out wrong in the brief, trains the team to read that record, and hands over the brief, the settings and what connects to what. On a Project the accounts are the business's own from go-live.

Where it is used in full: What happens in the first three weeks?

What do the words about the record and the plans mean?

The record every call leaves, the distinction the privacy policy turns on, and the three plans the work runs under.

Call record

Also called: The record.

The call record is what every call leaves behind: the caller's reason for ringing, the receptionist's answer, anything booked or captured, and whether the call was transferred. On a Durbacti build it arrives soon after the call, where the business chose on the scope call: email, SMS, a CRM or calendar entry, or the voice platform's dashboard. The record is how a wrong answer is found by the owner, not a customer. Every call to Durbacti's own line lands in a database that emails an alert for each call leaving an enquiry and keeps the transcript for 90 days.

Where it is used in full: When the AI receptionist gets it wrong: how you find out and how it gets fixed

Transcription

Transcription is text written from the caller's speech as the call happens, so a person can follow up afterwards. A recording is the audio itself, kept to be played back. Durbacti's own line is transcribed and not recorded: neither Durbacti nor the voice platform keeps any audio, so there is nothing to play back. A scheduled job deletes the transcript after 90 days, while the summary and what the caller gave stay with the enquiry. A caller who would rather not be transcribed says so, and only a name and number are kept for a callback.

Where it is used in full: Privacy policy

Project

A Project is Durbacti's fixed-scope build: one system, built, connected to the tools the business already uses, the team trained on it and handed over with documentation, for a price agreed on the scope call and no ongoing fee to Durbacti. The receptionist, its number and its calendar and CRM connections sit in accounts the business owns, and the voice platform bills the business directly. Ownership cuts both ways: after handover a fact in the brief that goes stale is the business's to change, with the documentation to do it. Best when you know which problem you want solved.

Where it is used in full: How pricing works

Retainer

A Retainer is the monthly arrangement in which Durbacti keeps building: each month it reports on what the systems did, tunes what they got wrong and ships the next automation on a rolling roadmap, with priority support and strategy sessions. The voice platform account and the number sit with Durbacti, its charges inside the monthly price, or in the business's own account, as agreed on the scope call. When they sit with Durbacti, more call minutes in a month mean a larger bill, and the line depends on that account staying in good standing, which the monthly price covers.

Where it is used in full: How pricing works

Care plan

A Care plan is Durbacti's support for a system already live, whether a receptionist, a website or an automation. It is watched and fixed before the business notices, updated when a tool it connects to changes underneath it, answered within guaranteed response times and reported on in a monthly health report. It can start at stage five, on a system someone else built, if that system is something Durbacti can reasonably support. Whether it also covers a change to the business's own hours or prices is settled on the scope call, not assumed.

Where it is used in full: How pricing works

What do the words about the website work mean?

Three words from the website side of the business, each applied to durbacti.com itself: the calculator can be shown working, and the other two cannot yet.

Cited by an AI assistant

Cited by an AI assistant means the assistant quotes or links a page as the source of an answer rather than answering from its training. Durbacti's website work is built for that: pages that read without JavaScript, the answer in the first sentences, questions as headings, honest dates, one entity graph in structured data, and a build check that fails if any of it regresses. Whether an assistant cites a page cannot be measured by anyone yet; whether its crawlers fetch the page can, in server logs. The enquiry form on durbacti.com also asks whether an assistant sent the person.

Where it is used in full: How to get your website cited by AI

WebMCP

WebMCP is a browser proposal under which a web page describes its forms and tools to an AI assistant in the visitor's browser, so the assistant can use the page rather than only read it. On durbacti.com two tools are described: the enquiry form, every field described and the form itself named and described, and the missed call calculator, registered as a function with four inputs. Browsers without WebMCP ignore both. The person, not the agent, presses send, and an agent filling the form is told to invent nothing. No browser agent can be shown using either tool today.

Where it is used in full: WebMCP: will AI agents use your website, or only read it?

Missed call cost

Also called: What missed calls cost.

Missed call cost is the most unanswered calls could be costing one business, from its own numbers, not a published statistic: calls a week, the share unanswered, the share of those callers who would have booked, and a job's value. Those are multiplied in that order to a weekly figure, then by 52 to a year. Durbacti's calculator shows every line of that working so it can be checked by hand. The result is a ceiling, not a forecast: some of those callers would have rung back, and no published figure stands in for a week of your call records.

Where it is used in full: Missed call calculator

What this page will not do

Define words durbacti.com does not use. A page of industry terms written to catch searches is a doorway page. Every word above is here because a page on durbacti.com uses it, and the definition points at that page.

Describe a competitor's product. The two comparison pages the terms above point at describe an answering service and a phone menu on their own terms. No vendor's receptionist is described; How do you test an AI receptionist before you pay for it? says to ring theirs and find out.

Give a legal meaning. Consent, recording and retention have legal meanings that depend on your business. Call recording and consent in NSW describes the system precisely enough for a lawyer to assess, and the lawyer answers.

Claim these are the industry's definitions. They are what the words mean when durbacti.com uses them, written so a reader or an assistant can check each one against the page it points to.

The five stages, where most of these words come fromWhat happens in the first three weeksWhat the finished receptionist does

The words: common questions

Is a virtual receptionist a person or a program?

Whether a virtual receptionist is a person or a program is not something the phrase tells you, so it needs checking. Durbacti uses it to mean the program: the receptionist on 0483 982 033 calls itself a virtual receptionist before the caller has said anything, so the caller knows a program is answering, and it says it is an AI receptionist if asked. When a vendor uses the phrase, ask which one picks up, and whether the caller is told before anything is captured.

Is a Care plan the same as a Retainer?

No. A Retainer is Durbacti building: each month it reports on what the systems did, tunes what they got wrong and ships the next automation on a rolling roadmap. A Care plan is Durbacti keeping what is already live working. It watches the system and fixes it before you notice, updates it when a tool it connects to changes, answers within a guaranteed time and sends a monthly health report, and it can sometimes start on a system another agency built. Which covers a change to your own hours or prices is settled on the scope call, not assumed.

Which of Durbacti's own words does the receptionist itself use on a call?

The receptionist on 0483 982 033 uses Durbacti's words itself. It opens by saying it is a virtual receptionist, says the call is transcribed and not recorded before anything is captured, and offers a business a strategy call. Asked about Durbacti, it names the proof of concept, the scope and quote, go-live, and the Project, Retainer and Care plan. A caller who asks whether they are speaking to a person is told it is an AI receptionist. The brief, the handoff rules and the record are words for the people who build and run it; the receptionist never says them.

Hear two of them in the greeting

Ring 0483 982 033 and the receptionist says it is a virtual receptionist and that the call is transcribed and not recorded, before you say a word. The words about the build and the plans come up on a free strategy call.

Book a free strategy call

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