The pause before your receptionist started speaking has roughly halved on the slowest calls. Measured across a run of real calls, the worst turn went from 7.3 seconds to 2.8, and the slowest one in twenty from 4.7 seconds to 2.2. The typical turn was already reasonably quick and is a little quicker still. It is the slow ones that mattered: a line that usually answers promptly and occasionally leaves a caller hanging feels unreliable in a way that a consistently average one does not.
The cause was the assistant thinking before it spoke. On harder questions the model was working the answer through internally before saying a word, and on a phone call that time is silence the caller is sitting in. It turned out we could ask it not to: the facts a call actually turns on — your opening hours, which appointments are free, why a day is unavailable — are all worked out by SIMCOAI before the model is asked anything, precisely so they cannot be got wrong. The model is putting a sentence around facts it has already been handed, and that needs no deliberation.
One honest trade. In testing, an order status enquiry occasionally asked to confirm the email or phone number on the order rather than reading the status straight out — about one time in six, against none before. That is a check rather than a mistake, and it costs a caller one extra sentence, but we would rather tell you than have you notice. If it proves annoying we can put the previous behaviour back without a release. Hear it in Call Studio