A small team in San Francisco. We install it by hand.

Why the receptionist comes first

A shop closes at seven. Somebody calls at ten past eight to ask a price and whether tomorrow works. The phone rings out. They do not leave a message, because most people do not. They call the next place on the list.

The owner never learns that call happened. There is nothing to be annoyed about in the morning, no missed-call notification that means anything, just a quiet number that was going to be a customer.

We could have led with a general assistant for small businesses. We have built enough of those to know how they go: a demo that impresses, then months of tuning, then an owner who stops opening it. So the product we install most is the smallest thing that is worth money on its own. One question, answered after close, from facts you approved, with a person able to step in.

Text rather than voice is a deliberate choice too. People hang up on robots, and they should. Nobody hangs up on a text. They read it, and they read it again in the morning when they are deciding who to call back.

And the projects that come after

The receptionist is not the limit. The same team builds custom AI for independent businesses: booking and intake flows, quotes and paperwork drafted from what the customer said, follow-up that goes out in your own words, internal tools, and connections to the software you already run. Those are scoped on a call and quoted per project, and they usually cost more than a receptionist setup. If you are not sure which you need, say what is eating your week and we will tell you which one, or neither.

What installing it actually means

We do the install on a call with you. Not a signup form, not an onboarding sequence, not a support portal. Fifteen minutes to see what your phone does today, then the work.

We call your line together and watch where an unanswered call goes. We register the text sender so your customers get a number that is allowed to reply to them, with STOP and HELP working. Then we write the facts list with you: your hours, your prices, your services, the four things every caller asks, and you read every line before it goes live.

Then we set up your alert, and we run one takeover test, where you step into a live thread and type as yourself while we watch. That part matters. The first time you take over a conversation should not be the night a customer is upset.

After that it answers your after-hours texts for two weeks while you read along, and things get corrected. There is always a week of that. An answer is slightly wrong, a price changed in March, a question arrives that nobody thought of. You send them to us, we fix them, and billing has not started.

When something breaks later, you reach a person. There is no ticket queue.

What we will tell you on the call

If your line cannot carry business texting, we will say so in the first ten minutes, and you will not have paid anything. If your customers will only ever call and speak to a human, a human answering service is the better buy and we will point you at one. If voicemail is already working for you, we will say that too.

We install every copy ourselves. That caps how many businesses we take on at once, which is fine. It also means the people who answer when you have a problem are the people who built the thing.

How to reach us

Email is usually the fastest, and we reply by the next business day. The phone number is answered by our own AI receptionist, which takes your details for a call back; it does not accept texts.

• Emailhello@cooli.ai
• Call(415) 914-7758
• Calendar15 minutes, whenever suits you
• WhereSan Francisco, California

Before you get in touch

The fastest way to find out whether this is for you is to be the customer for a minute. The demo uses sample facts, and the replies are automated, the same way they would be on your line.