Glossary

Plain English, every term.

Plain-English definitions of the AI receptionist, telephony, dispatch, privacy, and pricing terms used across aiapps365. 18 terms, anchor-linked.

AI receptionist

AI receptionist: Software that answers your business phone, holds a real conversation with the caller, books appointments, transfers urgent calls, and logs the call. Replaces the live human at a front desk for inbound calls, available 24/7.
Voice cloning: Synthesizing an AI voice that imitates a specific real person. aiapps365 deliberately does NOT do this — we use neutral, professional AI voices so callers know they're not being deceived.
Warm transfer: When the AI connects a caller to a human and verbally hands off context first ('Jane is calling about an emergency furnace repair, sending her to you now'). Opposite of a cold transfer where the human picks up cold.
After-hours overflow: Routing of calls that come in outside business hours. With aiapps365, after-hours calls are answered by the AI, which books non-urgent jobs into the next business day and escalates emergencies to your on-call number.

IVR (Interactive Voice Response): The classic 'press 1 for sales' phone tree. Cheap and reliable but unable to handle anything outside its scripted options. aiapps365 replaces IVR with a conversational AI that handles open-ended speech.
Twilio: The cloud telephony provider that connects your business number to our AI. Twilio handles the actual phone-network plumbing; we handle the conversation. You keep your existing number; Twilio just becomes the carrier behind it.
Call forwarding: Telling your phone provider to route incoming calls to a different number. To set up aiapps365, you forward your business line to our intake number — typically a one-line setting in your provider's dashboard.
Speed-to-lead: The time between a customer reaching out and the business getting back to them. Studies show conversion drops off a cliff after 5 minutes; AI receptionists collapse speed-to-lead from hours-or-never down to seconds.

Dispatch: Deciding which technician handles which job and when. For HVAC and plumbing, dispatching a tech to a service call. The AI receptionist captures the appointment; dispatch decides who gets it.
FSM (Field Service Management): Software that runs the operations side of a service business — scheduling, dispatching, invoicing, technician tracking. Common tools: ServiceTitan, Housecall Pro, Jobber, FieldEdge. aiapps365 integrates with these to write appointments directly into your existing FSM.
Recall (a.k.a. customer recall): Reaching back out to a past customer to remind them they're due for service ('your annual furnace check is up'). One of the cheapest sources of new revenue for service businesses; aiapps365 Platinum automates it.
Review velocity: How quickly and consistently a business gets new online reviews. Google ranks businesses partly on review velocity — recent reviews matter more than old ones. aiapps365 Platinum asks happy customers for a review automatically after the job.

Row-level security (RLS): A database feature that ensures one customer business can never read or write another customer business's data, even if a bug in the application code tried to. aiapps365 uses Postgres RLS on every table that holds customer data.
HIPAA: The US health-data privacy law that applies to medical and dental practices. Requires specific technical, administrative, and physical safeguards. aiapps365 is not HIPAA-compliant yet — that work is in progress for the Phase 3 launch into medical and dental.
CCPA: California Consumer Privacy Act. Gives California residents rights to access, delete, and opt out of sale of their personal data. aiapps365 honors CCPA-equivalent rights for any caller regardless of state.
BAA (Business Associate Agreement): A HIPAA-required contract between a healthcare provider and any vendor handling patient health information. aiapps365 will sign BAAs once HIPAA-compliance work is complete.

Passthrough cost: A cost we incur from a third-party provider (e.g., per-minute telephony fees from Twilio) and bill you at exactly what we paid, with no markup. Listed as a separate line item on your invoice for transparency.
Tier (Basic / Silver / Platinum): The three subscription levels of aiapps365. Each tier adds capability on top of the one below it. Tier pricing varies slightly by vertical because the work to operate the AI for an HVAC business differs from a law firm.

Definitions are easier to understand when you can hear the AI doing the work. 30 minutes, on a real number.