Conversational IVR: an AI phone menu callers can just talk to

Conversational IVR is a phone menu you talk to. Instead of "press 1 for scheduling, press 2 for billing", the system asks "How can I help?" and works out from the caller’s own words what they need, then answers, books or routes the call.

Traditional IVR makes the caller do the sorting. They listen to six options, guess which one fits a burst pipe, press 3, and land in the wrong queue. A lot of them just hang up.

With Vocenya, the AI does the sorting. A caller who says "there’s water coming through my kitchen ceiling" is treated as an emergency. A caller asking whether you take their insurance gets an answer. A caller who wants Thursday morning gets booked.

	Press-1 phone tree	Vocenya conversational IVR
How callers choose	Listen to a list, press a key	Say what they need in their own words
Simple questions	Usually a recording, or a queue	Answered on the spot from your business knowledge
Booking	Transferred to someone who books	Booked into your calendar during the call
After hours	"Our office is closed"	Takes the details, books, or reaches the on-call person
Changing it	Re-record prompts, rebuild the tree	Edit a flow, or describe the change in a sentence

Vocenya does not have a keypad menu for callers. Every caller talks to the receptionist, which answers in the caller’s language.

In the portal, under Call & chat flows, you tell the receptionist what to do in the situations that matter most. Each flow starts from what the caller wants, with a few example phrases, and ends in an action:

• Book an appointment in your connected calendar.
• Transfer to a person, warm, with a short spoken briefing for whoever answers.
• Hand to a live agent from GH Live.
• Alert the owner (urgent), so an emergency reaches you right away.
• Take a message, with the details you asked for.
• End the call politely.

In between, a flow can ask questions, tell the caller something, or branch on their answer.

There are three ways to build one. Guided walks you through it card by card. The Builder shows it as a diagram, for flows with branches. And Describe it writes the flow from a sentence, like "After hours, take a message and alert me right away if it sounds urgent." You review what it wrote before turning it on.

Most industries also get ready-made flows to start from, such as an emergency transfer for plumbers or a new-patient flow for dentists. The first flow that matches wins, so you put the important ones at the top.

When a flow sends a call to a person, Vocenya tries a free GH Live agent if you have them, then your team, then your transfer number.

Your team is a ring list on the Team calls page. Choose Everyone at once, where the first to answer gets the caller, or One after another, in the order you set. Each person can take calls in the Vocenya app or on their own mobile, and can pause their calls when they are off.

Every transfer is warm. The caller stays on the line while Vocenya rings your side, and whoever answers hears who is calling and why before they are connected. If nobody answers, the receptionist comes back to the caller and takes a message, and your team gets a missed-transfer alert.

Your phone number has rules for during business hours and after hours, worked out from your weekly hours and holiday hours. A typical setup: during the day the AI answers and transfers urgent calls to the office; at night it answers, books where it can, and only alerts the on-call person for real emergencies. We set these number rules up with you.

Flows can also be limited to While open or While closed, so an "after-hours lead" flow only runs when you are closed. See the after-hours answering service for the night-time side in more detail.

Two things we are building, and do not offer yet: named departments you can route to (sales, service, billing, each with its own people and hours), and an optional keypad fallback for callers who would rather press a number. Until then, flows plus your team ring list cover most small-business routing.

Conversational IVR is part of the Vocenya AI receptionist, not a separate product. Business-hours and after-hours call flows, calendar booking and warm transfers are part of the Growth plan ($249/mo, 1,000 AI minutes) and the Pro plan ($499/mo, 2,500 AI minutes). GH Live agents are priced per business.

Every plan has a 14-day free trial, there is no contract, and you can cancel any time. Try the demo on this page: enter your website, take the call, and tell the receptionist what you need, the way your own callers would.