Never miss a call with the top AI answering service for growing businesses
Answer questions and take down messages from your customers with Sona, OpenPhone’s 24/7 AI agent. Say goodbye to missed calls and stay aligned with your team using the most collaborative business phone system.
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Trusted by over 60,000 businesses
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Smarter than voicemail, more affordable than legacy answering services
Why use Sona as your AI phone answering service
Older answering services work outside your team’s communication platform. Sona is an artificial intelligence (AI) answering service integrated into OpenPhone. That way, your team has complete visibility into the conversations Sona handles, and you can follow up faster as needed.
Set up Sona in minutes using OpenPhone’s call flow builder. You can add it to multiple points in your call flow so it can step in whenever you’re unavailable. Test different greetings or AI phone call scenarios before you activate it for callers.
Plus, instantly see Sona’s answers to customer questions or the messages customers leave. View Sona’s call summaries or the entire call transcript for complete context. Your team has clear oversight into Sona’s performance, and you can adjust how it handles customer interactions.
Want the best AI answering service that helps you save money? Sona is available at a fraction of the cost of traditional answering services, which means you can answer more calls without spending more.
Move faster with the best AI assistant
Train Sona in seconds. Assign Sona calls in minutes.
Train Sona on your documentation
Sona talks to your customers just like a member of your team. Upload your key policies and answers to FAQs to Sona’s knowledge base so it can give the right information to callers.
Add Sona to existing call flows
No need to forward incoming calls to an external service or worry about having clear oversight of the conversations happening.
Take detailed messages for follow-ups
Sona takes messages as accurately as a human. Go beyond basic info like a caller’s name and reason for their call — find out what products and services they’re interested in. Sona can even request specific information based on the keywords you provide.
Instantly review Sona’s call logs
View Sona’s call summaries, transcripts, and messages in your OpenPhone inbox seconds after calls end. No more waiting for your answering service to summarize your calls and email them to you before you can follow up.
Feature comparison
See how Sona compares to traditional answering services.
Features
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Sona
Traditional answering services
Starting price per month
$49 for 50 calls, $0.99 per call for additional calls
~4x-7x the cost of Sona
Setup time
Instant
2-4 weeks
Brand voice and tone
Consistent
Highly variable
Monitoring
100% in OpenPhone
Custom solution or daily email summary
Integrations
HubSpot, Salesforce, Zapier, Make, Jobber, and more
Limited integration options
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Save time with AI
Give your workflow a boost with OpenPhone AI
Call summaries and next steps
OpenPhone AI automatically summarizes calls, then intelligently suggests next steps.
Automatic call transcripts
Read conversations in detail and easily reference or find info with time-stamps.
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Suggested contacts
Easily add new contacts with suggestions based on call and voicemail transcripts.
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AI call tags
Define your tags, and our AI automatically adds them to relevant calls—so you stay focused on what matters.
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“With Sona, I never worry about missing a call again. It’s like having a smart, reliable assistant who always picks up. It’s professional, friendly, and on it 24/7.”
How to set up Sona in four steps
- Start with a free trial.
- Try out our free trial features, including calls and recordings.
- Configure your Sona settings and test Sona in OpenPhone’s call flow builder.
- Once you’ve confirmed it’s a good fit, activate your OpenPhone account and get the Sona add-on.
More than an AI receptionist
Here’s why OpenPhone is the #1 phone provider for small businesses, as voted for by thousands of professionals.
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Get local and toll-free numbers for every team
Get as many phone numbers as your team needs with OpenPhone. Choose between local US and Canadian numbers or North American toll-free numbers.
Choose your preferred area codes based on where your customers live. You can also choose a vanity number to help you stand out from the competition.
All OpenPhone plans include a number for every user who joins your workspace. Plus, share numbers if you want dedicated numbers for your customer support and sales teams. Add more numbers as your team grows — additional numbers cost $5 per number per month.
Manage incoming calls easily
Handle customer calls smoothly with OpenPhone. Create customizable call routing experiences — during business hours and after hours — with our call flow builder.
Choose how your team receives incoming calls, either simultaneously or in custom batches with ring order. Give customers self-serve navigation options with phone menus (IVRs). Direct missed and unanswered calls to a secondary number with our call forwarding options. Set up custom voicemail greetings to set the right expectations and improve customer satisfaction.
Take advantage of additional call-handling features when you’re on a live call. Hand off customers to your colleagues with the right amount of context with warm transfers and bring stakeholders into the same call with group calling.
Foster stronger team collaboration
Work better together as a team with OpenPhone. Share incoming business calls and texts together and get visibility into all your customer interactions — calls, texts (SMS and MMS), voicemails, recordings, and more — in a shared inbox.
Automatically log calls and texts in your CRM with our native HubSpot and Salesforce integrations and keep your contact data in sync with your business phone. Use a different CRM? Build a custom integration using the OpenPhone API.
Troubleshoot ongoing issues and assign follow-up tasks in real time with internal threads. Anticipate business needs in advance and tag team members in OpenPhone — no need to juggle multiple apps. Want to know if someone has reviewed a call or recording? Inbox viewers keep you up to date so you don’t need to ping colleagues repeatedly.
Automated texting at your fingertips
Always send the right text message at the right time with OpenPhone.
Automatically send replies to customers with SMS auto-replies when your team is unavailable. Create pre-written templates to answer common questions over text with snippets. Schedule responses to customers based on their time zones with scheduled messages.
Plus, automate your texting workflows with our Zapier and Make integrations. Set up multi-step text automations for common use cases like appointment confirmations and reminders. Send more messages in less time to provide a better customer experience.
Better oversight for managers
Understand how your team is doing with OpenPhone. See your team’s performance as your call volume grows, and look at all the calls handled by Sona with call views. Review calls quickly using our AI call summaries and transcripts. You can even use AI to analyze phone calls with AI call tags.
Plus, track how your team is doing on a weekly, quarterly, or annual basis with our analytics. You can track individual team members or a specific department. And if you need to add or remove teammates in your OpenPhone account, you can make changes to who has access to your shared numbers in our Settings tab.
Call and text from anywhere
Bring your business phone and your AI phone agent with you wherever you go. All you need to use OpenPhone is a computer or smartphone and an internet connection.
Download our desktop and mobile apps on your preferred device. OpenPhone is available for Mac, Windows, iOS, and Android. Have a device that isn’t on any of these platforms? Log in to our web app in your browser.
Find out how much you’re investing in your business phone solution upfront on our pricing page.
Frequently asked questions
Can’t find the answer here? Check out our Help Center.
AI answering services are virtual AI receptionists that can handle incoming calls when team members are busy or unavailable. AI answering services are trained on your internal data so they can accurately answer questions on your team’s behalf.
Yes, you can use Sona, OpenPhone’s AI voice agent, to answer phone calls when your team is busy or unavailable. Sona naturally adapts to your customers based on the reason for their calls. You can use Sona to answer questions or take detailed messages, with more functionality coming.
Any small or growing business can benefit from an AI call answering service, including home services, real estate, and legal services.
While larger enterprises might have an in-house call center to tackle incoming calls, SMB business owners don’t have big budgets to allocate to customer support. Access to a virtual receptionist or an AI phone answering system can help them address customer requests without spending too much time and money training human agents.
The average cost of a traditional answering service is around $250 per month for a fixed number of call minutes. Voice AI answering services are relatively new, but their cost is a fraction of the price of legacy services.
No, there is no free AI answering service that you can trust to take calls reliably for your business.
Ready to improve your team's communication?
Join thousands of businesses already using OpenPhone to communicate better with their customers.
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OpenPhone was issued a successful SOC 2 report and is actively monitored by Vanta.