AI Receptionist for Tradies in Australia: Quotes, Jobs and 000

An AI receptionist for tradies in Australia answers while you're on the tools, takes quote requests, books jobs and sends urgent jobs to the on-call tradie. Anyone in danger is told to get to safety and call 000. You can build one in Dograh, the open-source AI voice agent platform, and self-host it or run it on Dograh Cloud.

Key Takeaways

• A call missed on the tools is often a job won by the next tradie.
• Inbound calls and booking reminders are not telemarketing calls.
• Offer calls to past customers need a washed list and set calling hours.

You can't answer a phone while you're up a ladder or under a sink. This post works through what a missed call costs, then quotes, bookings and urgent jobs, the 000 line, and the Do Not Call rules for outbound calls, and how each part runs in Dograh.

What a missed call costs a tradie

A customer with a leaking hot water system rings the first tradie on the list, and if nobody answers, they ring the second. By the time you're off the roof, the job has gone.

Here is an example with made-up numbers, so swap in your own. Say you miss 10 calls a week while on the tools, 3 of them are real jobs, and an average job is worth $400. That is $1,200 of work a week, or $62,400 over a year, walking to someone else.

Your own figures come from your phone bill and your job software. Count the missed calls for two weeks, check how many callers never rang back, and multiply by your average invoice.

There is more competition for each call too. The Australian Bureau of Statistics counts 2,814,778 actively trading businesses, and construction businesses grew 3.4% over the latest financial year. More businesses in the same suburbs means a missed call is easier to lose.

Quote requests: fixed prices only

The agent can give a price only when the price is already fixed, and everything else becomes a site visit. Fixed prices are the ones that don't depend on what you find. A call-out fee, a flat rate for a smoke alarm swap or a standard tap replacement qualify. A tripping switchboard or a leak inside a wall doesn't, because nobody knows the job until someone looks. Put the fixed prices in a Knowledge Base file the agent reads, and the prompt tells the agent to read a price only when it appears in that list, word for word. Our post on AI voice agents for plumbing companies explains why price ranges cause more trouble than they save.

For everything else, the agent collects the address, what the customer sees and hears, and when they're home. It writes that as a quote request or site visit into your job software through an HTTP API tool. ServiceM8, simPRO, Tradify or any other system with an API connects this way, so you open the app on your lunch break and the request is already there.

Booking jobs while you're on the tools

The agent books into the windows your job software says are free, and a job counts as booked only when the software confirms it. During the call, a tool reads the open windows for the trade and suburb, the agent offers two or three, and a second tool writes the booking once the customer picks one. The agent reads the date, window and address back, and calls it booked only when the software returns a job number. Add a Preset Parameter named workflow_run_id to that tool, so your system can ignore a duplicate if a request is sent twice. Our post on home-services appointment booking walks through the full booking call.

Calls you do miss can still be won back. When your phone system logs a missed call, it can start a callback through the API Trigger, and the call is placed as soon as your system sends the request. One callback is enough, and the agent opens by saying it's returning their call.

Australian callers say "arvo", "sparky" and "hot water service", and they name suburbs a generic speech model may not know. Add your trade words and service suburbs to the Dictionary in the agent's Settings. Pick a voice with an Australian accent so the business sounds local.

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Urgent jobs and the on-call tradie

Urgent jobs go to a person, and danger gets a fixed line before anything else. Transfer Call hands the caller to the on-call tradie, and it works on Twilio, Telnyx, Plivo, Cloudonix and Asterisk ARI. Dograh calls the tradie's mobile first and connects the customer only when someone answers. If you run more than one trade, a context mapping can pick the number from the trade the agent recorded, so a burst pipe rings the plumber and a dead switchboard rings the sparky. The agent writes the job details to your system before the transfer, because no summary travels with the call by default.

If nobody picks up within the timeout, 30 seconds by default, the customer stays with the agent. It tells them someone will call back and writes the callback request to your job software, with the address and what's wrong.

Some calls are about safety before they are about a booking. Those lines are fixed text, played as a pathway's Transition Speech, because the language model writes its own words everywhere else. Water near a power point or a sparking switchboard gets: "If anyone is in danger, get to safety and call 000." A gas smell gets: "If you smell gas, leave the building now and call 000 or your gas company from outside." Put a short version in the greeting too, so a caller who never says "gas" still hears it.

Do Not Call rules for outbound calls

Most of a tradie's calls are not telemarketing at all, and the rules start when you call people with an offer. The Do Not Call Register rules for businesses say calls about appointment reminders, rescheduling, payments and replies to a customer's own enquiry are not telemarketing. A customer ringing you is not telemarketing either. So the receptionist, the booking call and the reminder the day before need no register check.

A call offering a new service to past customers is different. Numbers on the register need consent, and the list must be washed against the register within the last 30 days. Consent can be express or inferred from an existing relationship. Express consent with no set end date lapses after three months, and it ends straight away when the person says no.

The telemarketing industry standard sets calling hours of 9am to 8pm on weekdays and 9am to 5pm on Saturday, with no calls on Sunday or national public holidays. Caller ID must be on, the call ends when the person asks, and penalties reach $250,000. The standard covers all voice calls, so the safe reading treats an AI offer call like any other telemarketing call.

In Dograh, a campaign runs its calling hours in one time zone, so a list that spans Perth and Sydney needs one campaign for each. You set the retries (0 to 10), and your own list keeps the record of who said no.

The Privacy Act covers fewer tradies than you might think. The OAIC's small business guidance says most businesses with a turnover of $3 million or less are outside it, though some, such as health service providers, are covered regardless. Keep call data to what the job needs either way, and confirm your position with counsel, including your state's call-recording rules.

A receptionist you rent or one you run

Most AI receptionists for tradies are monthly hosted plans, and the other option is a receptionist your business runs itself. A hosted plan is quick to start, and the vendor decides the voice, the models and where calls are stored. Dograh is open source, so you or your IT person can run it on your own server, or start on the managed cloud version and move later.

You can record the greeting and the safety lines in your own voice, so regulars hear the boss when they ring. The agent plays those pre-recorded clips where they fit and falls back to text-to-speech for the rest. Self-hosted Dograh has no per-minute platform fee, but servers, model keys and phone minutes still cost money. Dograh Cloud charges a 1¢-a-minute platform fee.

Every call has a full trace of what the agent heard and said at each turn, and QA scores a sample of calls you choose. That is how you find the call where it misheard a suburb or gave a price it shouldn't have.

For data, Dograh Cloud names no data region. Self-host in an Australian cloud region with the speech and language models running there too, and the calls stay onshore.

Where to start

Start with the after-hours line, because those calls go to voicemail today. Build the safety lines first and test them on a real phone call, since browser test calls cannot run a transfer. Then let the agent take daytime overflow and book jobs. Offer calls to past customers come last, once your list is washed and your hours are set.