Glossary: AI Telephony Terms
AI phone assistant
An AI phone assistant is an AI-powered phone service that answers incoming calls automatically, understands the request and replies in natural language. It captures appointments, reservations or service enquiries and passes the important parts on to the team in a structured way.
Voicebot
A voicebot is an AI system that understands and answers spoken language on the phone. It takes calls, recognises the request and responds in natural language – without a human having to step in.
AI telephony
AI telephony refers to the use of artificial intelligence for phone calls – from answering automatically to understanding the request and replying in natural language. It replaces rigid voice menus with flexible, conversation-like dialogue.
Conversational AI
Conversational AI is an umbrella term for AI technologies that hold natural conversations with people – by text (chatbots) or voice (voicebots). It combines speech recognition, language understanding and speech output to handle requests without human intervention.
Voice assistant
A voice assistant is a program that recognises spoken language and responds to it. In a business phone context, a voice assistant takes calls, answers questions and records requests – as the telephone version of well-known voice assistants.
IVR (Interactive Voice Response)
IVR (Interactive Voice Response) is an automated phone system that guides callers through a menu – classically by key press ("Press 1"). It routes calls or gives predefined information without an employee picking up.
Automated call answering
Automated call answering means incoming calls are taken by a system instead of an employee. Modern AI solutions understand the request and respond appropriately, rather than just playing a recorded message.
Call forwarding (Rufumleitung)
Call forwarding ensures incoming calls are automatically redirected to another destination – such as a mobile phone, a colleague or a phone service. It kicks in, for example, when the line is busy, the call isn't answered or outside business hours.
Call transfer (Anrufweiterleitung)
Call transfer refers to passing a call to another person, department or number. It can happen before answering (like call forwarding) or during the conversation, for example to connect the caller to the right contact.
Virtual phone system
A virtual phone system (cloud PBX) manages incoming and outgoing calls over the internet rather than via an on-site phone system. Functions like greeting, routing and reporting run in the cloud and can be used location-independently.
SIP trunk
A SIP trunk is a virtual phone line that connects a phone system to the public telephone network via the internet (VoIP). Instead of physical ISDN lines, calls run over the SIP protocol as data packets.
EU AI Act
The EU AI Act is the European Union's regulation for artificial intelligence. It sorts AI applications into risk classes and mandates transparency obligations – for example that people must be able to tell when they're talking to an AI. Empfango meets this obligation through fixed announcements about AI use and recording.